Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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!
-
@rj_dale have you added a rel=canonical tag to the page to make sure you're marking to Google the correct version of the page? Even if it doesn't have a duplicate page, add a self-referencing canonical tag and if you need any more help - speak to a freelance seo consultant.
-
Based on your description, it appears as though the page is already indexed in the search engine. This is being picked up by the Moz tool and being reported as duplicate content.
What you can try to do is - for the page that is flagged by the Moz tool as duplicate enter it in Google as the following
site:example.com/moz-flagged-duplicate-url
This will show if the page is already indexed.
If the page is indexed, I would recommend you to:
a) Review the two or more similar URLs flagged as duplicates and see if they are actual duplicates or a tool-based error. If it is a tool based error you can ignore the issue. If you think the pages are actual duplicates you can evaluate pages in terms of backlinks or incoming traffic and choose the preferred page version that should be indexed in search engines. Place a canonical tag of the preferred page version on all the pages flagged as duplicate.
b) Please remove the noindex tag. This is not the right technique to handle duplicate content for SEO results.
c) You would have to wait for Google to crawl and update results. You can promote your new page on social media, email marketing campaigns, or build backlinks to the page. With time search engines will pick up these changes and updates its indexed results.
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
-
Is it Ok to have multiple domains (separate website different content) rank for similar keywords?
Is it 'OK' to have multiple domains in the following instance? Does Google actively discourage multiple (but completely different sites) domains from the same company appearing in the search results for the same and or similar keywords if the content is slightly different? This is where the 'main site' has the details, and you can purchase product, and the second site is a blog site only. We are creating a separate content blogsite; which would be on a second domain that will be related to one portion of content on main site. They would be linking back and forth, or maybe the blog site would just link over to the main site so they can purchase said product. This would be a similar scenario to give you an idea of how it would be structured: MAIN SITE: describes a few products, and you can purchase from this site SECOND SITE, different domain: a blog site that contains personal experiences with one of the products. BOTH sites will be linked back and forth....or as mentioned maybe the blog site could just link over to the 'main site' Logo would be a modified version of the main logo and look and feel of the sight would be similar but not exactly the same. MORE INFO: the main site has existed for way over 10 years, starting to gain some traction in an extremely competitive market, but does not rank super high, is gaining traction due to improvements in speed, content, onpage SEO, etc... So in addition to my main question of is this 'ok' to have this second domain, also will it hurt the rankings or negatively affect the 'main' site? Wondering about duplicate content issues, except it will be slightly different...
SEO Tactics | | fourwhitesocks0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?
If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....
Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce
Hi, My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles - The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are Products Map :: Company Name How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | frankrizzo0 -
We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like: http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not. Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem: RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L] Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
"nofollow pages" or "duplicate content"?
We have a huge site with lots of geographical-pages in this structure: domain.com/country/resort/hotel domain.com/country/resort/hotel/facts domain.com/country/resort/hotel/images domain.com/country/resort/hotel/excursions domain.com/country/resort/hotel/maps domain.com/country/resort/hotel/car-rental Problem is that the text on ie. /excursions is often exactly the same on .../alcudia/hotel-sea-club/excursion and .../alcudia/hotel-beach-club/excursion The two hotels offer the same excursions, and the intro text on the pages are the exact same throughout the entire site. This is also a problem on the /images and /car-rental pages. I think in most cases the only difference on these pages is the Title, description and H1. These pages do not attract a lot of visits through search-engines. But to avoid them being flagged as duplicate content (we have more than 4000 of these pages - /excursions, /maps, /car-rental, /images), do i add a nofollow-tag to these, do i block them in robots.txt or should i just leave them and live with them being flagged as duplicate content? Im waiting for our web-team to add a function to insert a geographical-name in the text, so i could add ie #HOTELNAME# in the text and thereby avoiding the duplicate text. Right now we have intros like: When you visit the hotel ... instead of: When you visit Alcudia Sea Club But untill the web-team has fixed these GEO-tags, what should i do? What would you do and why?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | | RiseSEO0