Duplicate Content
-
HI There,
Hoping someone can help me - before i damage my desk banging my head.
Getting notifications from ahrefs and Moz for duplicate content. I have no idea where these weird urls have came from , but they do take us to the correct page (but it seems a duplicate of this page).
correct url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/Antique-Vintage-Rings-c152.htm
Incorrect url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm
This is showing for most of our store categories
Desperate for help as to what could be causing these issues. I have a technical member of the ecommerce software go through the large sitemap files and they assured me it wasn't linked to the sitemap files.
Gemma
-
Hi Gemma,
Strange! Typically, %20 is the symbol that content management systems use to convert spaces into allowable characters in URLs. Have you found any URLs that were written in the HTML with an accidental space?
That said, I know I'm a Moz associate and all, but Moz and Ahrefs are not nearly as good at understanding the web as Google; it's completely possible that these are errors that their crawlers are picking up, but Google isn't having a problem. Try searching for "site:[duplicate URL]" to see if Google is indexing this "duplicate content." I just checked with the example you provided, and it's not in Google's index.
If some other duplicate content URLs are in Google's index, then I'd use Google Analytics to determine where the traffic is coming from to these pages, in order to find where the URLs are written incorrectly.
Hope this helps!
Kristina
-
It seems strange that the weird url i get takes me to the right page but it shows the sites homepage meta information !! I have no clue why this would occur
-
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try and get to the cause of these urls and then if i cant get to the bottom of it i will look at adding 301's however it will mean adding a lot of them
-
Hi,
Thanks for taking the time to assist.
I have checked the internal and external links to the url and there aren't any, also checked sitemap and these links aren't present there.
Regarding https, it was switched on at one point for a matter of minutes as it was done in error.
Regarding the link you state we had issues with these in the past which were generated from an external site which we had no control over.
Im hitting blanks as to locating how these are being generated.
Can you tell me what screaming frog can show me that Moz and ahrefs software doesn't? I haven't used it before.
Gemma
-
In addition to what Bryan suggested, have you crawled your site using screaming frog or some other service.
Did you try going https: at some point??
Or... http://www.acsilver.co.uk/www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm
-
It seems like something about either your search functions, or the e-commerce functionality, is causing these duplicate pages. Without having access to that information, I can tell you that the best option from my point of view would be to redirect all of the "incorrect" urls to the "correct" ones using 301s. I suggest taking a look at this page on Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools) if you're unfamiliar with how that works. No matter what platform your website uses, this should do you good.
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 - working with CMS constraints
Hi, We use an industry-specific CMS and I'm struggling to figure out how we can fix duplicate content issues. Thankfully, the vendor has agreed to work on 301 vs 302 redirects. However, they aren't currently able to give us the ability to add rel=canonical tags to page headers (we've put it in their "suggestion box" which tends to take a long time, if ever, to materialize). My understanding is that the tag will not be recognized if it's in the body code, correct? (aka the part of the page we can edit from the CMS) Is there anything else I can do?
Technical SEO | | combska0 -
Duplicate Content Mystery
Hi Moz community! I have an ongoing duplicate mystery going on here and I'm hoping someone here can answer my question. We have an Ecommerce site that has a variety of product pages and category pages. There are Rel canonicals in place, along with parameters in GWT, and there are also URL rewrites. Here are some scenarios, maybe you can give insight as to what’s exactly going on and how to fix it. All the duplicates look to be coming from category pages specifically. For example:
Technical SEO | | Ecom-Team-Access
This link re-writes: http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html?cat=407&color=152&price=20- To: http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html The rel canonical tag looks like this: http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html" /> The CONTENT is different, but the URLs are the same. It thinks that the product category view is the same as the all products view, even though there is a canonical in there telling it which one is the original. Some of them don’t have anything to do with each other. Take a look: Link identified as duplicate: http://www.incipio.com/cases/smartphone-cases/htc-smartphone-cases/htc-windows-phone-8x-cases.html?color=27&price=20- Link this is a duplicate of: http://www.incipio.com/cases/macbook-cases/macbook-pro-13in-cases.html Any idea as to what could be happening here?0 -
Minimising the effects of duplicate content
Hello, We realised that one of our clients, copied a large part of content from our website to his. The normal reaction would be to send a cease and desist letter. Nevertheless this would probably mean loosing a good client. The client dumped the text of several articles (for example:
Technical SEO | | Lvet
http://www.velascolawyers.com/en/property-law/136-the-ley-de-costas-coastal-law.html ) Into the same page:
http://www.freundlinger-partners.com/en/home/faqs-property-law/ I convinced the client to place our authorship tags on this page, but I am wondering if this is enough. What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
Cross domain shared/duplicate content
Hi, I am working on two websites which share some of the same content and we can't use 301s to solve the problem; would you recommend using canonical tags? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Would Google Call These Pages Duplicate Content?
Our Web store, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/index.html, has struggled with duplicate content issues for some time. One aspect of duplicate content is a page like this: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html. When an audio book title goes out-of-publication we keep the page at our store and display a http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html whenever a visitor attempts to visit a specific title that is OOP. There are several thousand OOP pages. Would Google consider these OOP pages duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | lbohen0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Help removing duplicate content from the index?
Last week, after a significant drop in traffic, I noticed a subdomain in the index with duplicate content. The main site and subdomain can be found below. http://mobile17.com http://232315.mobile17.com/ I've 301'd everything on the subdomain to the appropriate location on the main site. Problem is, site: searches show me that if the subdomain content is being deindexed, it's happening really slowly. Traffic is still down about 50% in the last week or so... what's the best way to tackle this issue moving forward?
Technical SEO | | ccorlando0 -
Crawl Errors and Duplicate Content
SEOmoz's crawl tool is telling me that I have duplicate content at "www.mydomain.com/pricing" and at "www.mydomain.com/pricing.aspx". Do you think this is just a glitch in the crawl tool (because obviously these two URL's are the same page rather than two separate ones) or do you think this is actually an error I need to worry about? Is so, how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | MyNet0