Duplicate content and canonicalization confusion
-
Hello,
http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR pages have same content and their canonical refers to the page itself. Yet, they rank in search engines. Is it because they have been targeted to different geographical locations? If so, still the content is same.
Please help me clear this confusion.
Regards
-
I agree with you. It's all very confusing and little details make a BIG difference. Thanks for sticking with this.
-
Thanks a ton Donna for looking into the issue and helping at this level. I highly appreciate it
Their canonical tags confused me. As you have mentioned, the tags should have been one, I don't know why they are using two different ones. Probably, they have set the different geographic targets in Google Webmaster Tools and with the minor content variation and canonical tags, they want to signal Google to treat both the pages differently. I mean it's a big name in the world of ERP. They can't mess up with the canonical tags.
What do you think?
-
Okay. Let's start over looking at it from a goal perspective. I compared the two pages. Here is the difference between the two in terms of page text, highlighted in yellow - http://63.249.66.211/comparison.html. The differences are in the URL, the phone numbers at the top, a word here and there in the middle, and the 2nd block of text and photo under "Explore Our Solutions".
The first page, which I'll call India, has a canoncial tag pointing to itself. (http://www.sap.com/india/pc/bp/erp.html"/>) .
The second page, which I'll call UK, has a canoncial tag, also pointing to itself. (http://www.sap.com/uk/pc/bp/erp.html"/>).
- If you want both pages to rank and have authority, then you use the canonical tag. You need to use the same canonical tag on both pages. Right now they're different. That will essentially tell Google to treat the two pages as one; to show one or the other in search results, but considate their combined SEO value into one for ranking purposes.
- If you only want one page to rank, then noindex the other.
Does that make more sense?
-
Thanks for the reply Donna but my question is bit different. Could you please take a look at the rel canonical tag of the urls I posted. The content on both the pages is 100% same. The only difference is that they are targeted at different geographic locations. The canonical tags point to the page itself and not any master page.
-
This might help Shailendra - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en. Skim down to (or search for) the part beginning with "This indicates the preferred URL", about half-way down the page.
Bottom line, Google attempts to respect canonical tags but it's no guarantee. Increase your chances by using "absolute paths rather than relative paths with the
rel="canonical"
link element". -
Thanks everyone for the response! But I am still confused. The two links that I have posted in my initial question have exactly the same content on both the pages (targeted at different geographic locations) and their canonical tags do not refer to any master page but to them itself, i.e. canonical tag on page A refers to A and canonical tag on page B refers to B. Please take a look at both the pages: http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR
Regards
-
Canonical pages still get indexed at Google's discretion.
A related question was asked in March 2013 that I think, explains what you're seeing. I've cut and pasted the relevant part below. Mememax is the author.
"Normally the only thing which will prevent a page from ranking is noindex tag. If you don't want to have it indexed just noindex it, if that page has been laready indexed, put the noindex tag and delete from index using GWT option.
Concerning the canonical tag thing, it will consolidate the seo value in one page but it won't prevent those page to appear in rankings, however you may have two cases:
-
the two or more pages are identical. In that case google may accept the canonicalization and show always the original page.
-
the two or more pages are slightly different, it's the case of paginated pages which are canonicalized using rel next/prev. In that sense the whole value will be consolidated in page 1 but then the page which will be shown in the rankings will be the one which responds to that query, for example if someone is looking for blue glass, google will return the page which shows blue glass listing if that's different from the first one."
-
-
Yes, if they were directly competing against each other, you'd expect one of them to drop out of the rankings. What are they both ranking for?
If they are both showing up in the same search, my guess would be that they are very new and Google hasn't noticed the duplication.
But if you see the ranking in different searches (like Google UK and Google India), then you are probably right, Google does not see them as duplicate since they are being shown to different audiences.
-
Hi,
I am sharing two Matt cutts video on this to clear your confusion.I hope it helps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
International SEO And Duplicate Content Within The Same Language
Hello, Currently, we have a .com English website serving an international clientele. As is the case we do not currently target any countries in Google Search Console. However, the UK is an important market for us and we are seeing very low traffic (almost entirely US). We would like to increase visibility in the UK, but currently for English speakers only. My question is this - would geo-targeting a subfolder have a positive impact on visibility/rankings or would it create a duplicate content issue if both pieces of content are in English? My plan was: 1. Create a geo-targeted subfolder (website.com/uk/) that copies our website (we currently cannot create new unique content) 2. Go into GSC and geo-target the folder to the UK 3. Add the following to the /uk/ page to try to negate duplicate issues. Additionally, I can add a rel=canonical tag if suggested, I just worry as an already international site this will create competition between pages However, as we are currently only targeting a location and not the language at this very specific point, would adding a ccTLD be advised instead? The threat of duplicate content worries me less here as this is a topic Matt Cutts has addressed and said is not an issue. I prefer the subfolder method as to ccTLD's, because it allows for more scalability, as in the future I would like to target other countries and languages. Ultimately right now, the goal is to increase UK traffic. Outside of UK backlinks, would any of the above URL geo-targeting help drive traffic? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Decline in traffic and duplicate content in different domains
Hi, 6 months ago my customer purchased their US supplier and moved the supplier's website to their e-commerce platform. When moving to the new platform they copied the descriptions of the products from their site to the supplier's site so now both sites have the same content in the product pages. Since then they have experienced decrease in traffic in about 80%. They didn't implement canonical tag or hreflang. My customer's domain format is https://www.xxx.biz and the supplier's domain is https://www.zzz.com The last one is targeting the US and when someone from outside of the US wants to purchase a product they get a message that they need to move to the first website, the www.xxx.biz. Both sites are in English. The old site version of www.zzz.com, before the shit to the new platform, contained different product descriptions, and BTW, the old website version is still live and indexed under a subdomain of www.zzz.com. My question is what's the best thing to do in this case so that the rankings will be back to higher positions and they'll get back their traffic. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digital19740 -
Finding a specific link - Duplicating my own content
Hi Mozzers, This may be a bit of a n00b question and i feel i should know the answer but alas, here i am asking. I have a page www.website.co.uk/page/ and im getting a duplicate page report of www.website.co.uk/Page/ i know this is because somewhere on my website a link will exists using the capitalised version. I have tried everything i can think of to find it but with no luck, any little tricks? I could always rewrite the urls to lowercase, but I have downloadable software etc also on the website that i dont want to take the capitals out of. So the best solution seems to be finding the link and remove it. Most link checkers I use treat the capitalised and non capitalised as the same thing so really arent helping lol.
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Joomla: content accesible through all kinds of other links >> duplicate content?!
When i did a site: search on Google i've noticed all kind of URL's on my site were indexed, while i didn't add them to the Joomla navigation (or they were not linked anywhere on the site). Some examples: www.domain.com/1-articlename >> that way ALL articles are publicly visible, even if they are not linked to a menu-item... If by accident such a link get's shared it will be indexed in google, you can have 2 links with same content... www.domain.com/2-uncategorised >> same with categories, automatically these overview pages are visible to people who know this URL. On it you see all the articles that belong to that category. www.domain.com/component/content >> this gives an overview of all the categories inside your Joomla CMS I think most will agree this is not good for your site's SEO? But how can this be solved? Is this some kind of setting within Joomla? Anyone who dealt with these problems already?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, My site is being checked for errors by the PRO dashboard thing you get here and some odd duplicate content errors have appeared. Every page has a duplicate because you can see the page and the page/~username so... www.short-hairstyles.com is the same as www.short-hairstyles.com/~wwwshor I don't know if this is a problem or how the crawler found this (i'm sure I have never linked to it). But I'd like to know how to prevent it in case it is a problem if anyone knows please? Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Duplicate content error - same URL
Hi, One of my sites is reporting a duplicate content and page title error. But it is the same page? And the home page at that. The only difference in the error report is a trailing slash. www.{mysite}.co.uk www.{mysite}.co.uk/ Is this an easy htaccess fix? Many thanks TT
Technical SEO | | TheTub1