How come canonicalized pages are showing in the Duplicate Titles report?
-
I am currently removing all duplicate titles from my site via title tag changes, 301's, and in some instances, canonical tags.
I'm confused about why the Moz report spit out pages with duplicate titles that are canonicalized to other pages. Does Google actually consider these pages as having duplicate titles? Or is Roger Mozbot not intuitive enough to to disregard those pages?
-
Just jumping in here even though it's an old question.
The thing is, Moz is crawling the pages and showing duplicate titles, but if you have page B using rel=caonical pointing to page A, then Google will reference page A.
It's ok if page A and page B have the same title if using rel=canonical, because Google will follow that directive most of the time.
So if Moz is surfacing duplicate title tags but they are canonicalizing, it's safe to ignore Moz's flagged issue. Don't always take it at face value.
It would most likely be a waste of time to go change all the page titles for the duplicate pages if you're using rel=canonical.
-
Any time!
-
Got it! Thank you.
-
Pages canonicalized to the same page aren't duplicates, but their titles may still be. Canonicalization only affects the content of the page, not the title; the pages can still be resolved separately in the browser, so their titles may still be duplicates of one another.
If there are pages you don't want to surface in search results, you can noindex, follow those pages to prevent them showing up.
Sorry if my previous answer was a bit confusing! Hope this helps! If you've got more questions, feel free to write in to help@moz.com and we'll do what we can to sort things out for ya!
-
Thanks for your response. So you are saying that the pages that are canonicalized to the same page still are considered duplicates?
Let's say that Page A, Page B, and Page C all have the same title, with Page A being the canonical page. If Page B and Page C are both canonicalized to Page A, does that mean that Page B and C are considered to have duplicate titles while A is okay?
-
Hi there! Tawny from the Help Team here. Sergio's answer is helpful if you're dealing with duplicate content issues, and the links in that answer might help you figure out how to resolve those issues!
Pages are considered to have duplicate titles only if their titles are exact matches. There is no notion of overlapping or partial matches for this purpose. Like duplicate content, canonical versions should be considered, but not pages that refer to the canonical version. Furthermore, two pages with blank titles should not be considered duplicates of one another.
You can verify the page title by viewing the source code of the page itself. I hope this helps! Drop us a line at help@moz.com if you have any other questions or if there's anything that needs clarifying!
-
Hi,
I recently made the same question to moz support, here is my question and the reply:
QUESTION:
I am having a problem with a duplicated content error
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Crawl Issues Report - Duplicate Page Content for Bajalibros Argentina (www.bajalibros.com/AR)
Generated at Wed Jul 27 15:22:27 +00:00 2016
URL
https://www.bajalibros.com/AR/Samanta-Schweblin-Autor-426833https://www.bajalibros.com/AR/Catherine-Clement-Autor-184525
THE REPLY
Hi there! I think this has to do with how our tools determine what is duplicate content. Our tool has a 90% tolerance for duplicate content, which means it will flag any content that has 90% of the same code between pages. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text, so often it's a matter of finding the best answer for the duplicate pages in question.
For instance, often with ecommerce sites, product pages will come up with duplicate content between two colors of the same item, and in that case it's good to use the canonical tag. If there are two versions of the site that exist - for instance, example.com/subfolder andwww.example.com/subfolder - you can put in 301 redirects to the correct page: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection. If it's just two pages on different subjects but thin content, filling out that content with an extra paragraph or two can help.
There are more in-depth explanations of common answers to duplicate content on this page, if you're curious!: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or if there's anything that needs clarifying!
Hope this applies to you too
Best
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 Page content | What to do?
Hello Guys, I have some duplicate pages detected by MOZ. Most of the URL´s are from a registracion process for users, so the URL´s are all like this: www.exemple.com/user/login?destination=node/125%23comment-form What should I do? Add this to robot txt? If so how? Whats the command to add in Google Webmaster? Thanks in advance! Pedro Pereira
On-Page Optimization | | Kalitenko20140 -
Moz showing 384 description duplicates on my ecommerce store.... when I download CSV, most pages are coming from my WordPress Blog, why?
Hi, I am trying to investigate why I am getting 384 description duplicates on my ecommerce store (www.doggie-diva.com)? When I download the CSV file from MOZ, the majority of the pages they refer to are pages from my Word Press blog, which is hosted on a different server (blog.doggie-diva.com). I do have a link from my website to my Word Press blog and vice versa. Can you please explain to me why this is happening when I don't have duplicate content? Example of a page flagged from www.doggie-diva.com with duplicate content (http://blog.doggie-diva.com/tag/dog-gymnastics. Thanks, Rachel <colgroup><col width="549"></colgroup>
On-Page Optimization | | doggiedivalicious
| |0 -
Description tag not showing in the SERPs because page is blocked by Robots, but the page isn't blocked. Any help?
While checking some SERP results for a few pages of a site this morning I noticed that some pages were returning this message instead of a description tag, A description for this result is not avaliable because of this site's robot.s.txt The odd thing is the page isn't blocked in the Robots.txt. The page is using Yoast SEO Plugin to populate meta data though. Anyone else had this happen and have a fix?
On-Page Optimization | | mac22330 -
Please review page for on page SEO
I'm working on an adult dating site review blog and am hoping to build links to the category pages. It's a wordpress blog so the posts are categorised by topics. However can you tell me if there is enough content on the page for google to identify what the page is about? The problem is that the content of each category pages is pulled from the posts. What I think is needed is some static text on the page 2-300 words that use the keyword. Here's an example of a page targeting the keywords 'online dating'. http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/category/online-dating/
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK
[editor's note -- thumbnails on site may not be appropriate for some workplaces] Will the page rank like this if there are a good amount of authorative links or does the page itself need work?0 -
Page title changes based on results per page
I have a product listing that allows customers to set a results per page option. This ads a GET variable to the URL. I've added the page number to the title of this page if they go past the first page. If this results per page variable is added to the URL then google see it as a different page. Do I need to change the page title for this?
On-Page Optimization | | BedInABox.com0 -
How woud you deal with Blog TAGS & CATEGORY listings that are marked a 'duplicate content' in SEOmoz campaign reports?
We're seeing "Duplicate Content" warnings / errors in some of our clients' sites for blog / event calendar tags and category listings. For example the link to http://www.aavawhistlerhotel.com/news/?category=1098 provides all event listings tagged to the category "Whistler Events". The Meta Title and Meta Description for the "Whistler Events" category is the same as another other category listing. We use Umbraco, a .NET CMS, and we're working on adding some custom programming within Umbraco to develop a unique Meta Title and Meta Description for each page using the tag and/or category and post date in each Meta field to make it more "unique". But my question is .... in the REAL WORLD will taking the time to create this programming really positively impact our overall site performance? I understand that while Google, BING, etc are constantly tweaking their algorithms as of now having duplicate content primarily means that this content won't get indexed and there won't be any really 'fatal' penalties for having this content on our site. If we don't find a way to generate unique Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions we could 'no-follow' these links (for tag and category pages) or just not use these within our blogs. I am confused about this. Any insight others have about this and recommendations on what action you would take is greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | RoyMcClean0 -
Page title
So if we have a main category page on our site (mines an ecommerce site), do we go for more than that main keyword phrase for that category of products, or is it better to just keep it by itself, and not utilize the 65-70 characters available?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0 -
Urgent, Duplicate page title and content at eCommerce site- how to solve
Hi, there, does anyone can help to solve 'duplicate page title, duplicate page content' problem? it is a eCommerce site, each categories has hundreds of products, so there are more than 10 pages, but the report crawl the errors, i totally have no idea, can anyone help? Thanks a lot! Anna
On-Page Optimization | | anna-2944510