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?
-
There are two aspects to the issue:
1. Resolve the cause of the problem. Crawl your site, locate any links to alternate URLs and change the links on your site to use the correct version of the URL.
2. Add a 301 redirect from /bad-url to /good-url. This will ensure any link juice to the bad urls is retained, along with providing a good user experience.
-
You would add the canonical tag to your existing page.
You need to decide how you wish your page to be listed.
Those are two different URLs. They COULD lead to two different pages, but you are choosing to have them lead to the same page, which is a very standard practice. You need to let search engines know how you want the page to be listed. The URL without the .aspx extension is the friendlier URL. I would suggest choosing that one but it is up to you.
-
What page should I add the canonical tag to. From my research a canonical tag in function operates in a similar way to the 301 redirect. However I only have one content page even though it has two URL's. Do I need to create literally two different versions of this content and put the canonical tag on the unwanted page?
-
Hmm, I don't understand this. If a server can detect that these two URLs are the same why can't Google's billion dollar algorithm detect that these are the same?
-
This is not a glitch in the crawl tool. It is something that needs to be fixed.
As Cody suggested, search engines will not understand which URL is correct and any link credit can wind up being split.
Adding a canonical tag to your page will resolve the issue.
I would also examine the crawl report and look at the Referrer to determine if you have any links to the undesired page.
-
The thing is, in the eyes of a crawler, they are different pages, just like http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com are the same page, but the crawlers will see them as different pages.
Are you using URL rewriting to get rid of the extension? If so I could see where this might cause a canonicalization issue if you don't tell the search engines which page you want to be ranked by using rel=canonical or redirecting from pricing.aspx to pricing.
Try using OSE on pricing and then pricing.html and see if you get different statistics.
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 Issue
Hello, I recently solved www / no www duplicate issue for my website, but now I am in trouble with duplicate content again. This time something that I cannot understand happens: In Crawl Issues Report, I received Duplicate Page Content for http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19) http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1) Could you please help me figure out what is happenning here? By default, index.html is being loaded, but this is the only index.html I have in the folder. And it looks like the crawler sees two different pages with different DA... What should I do to handle this issue?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kfallconnect0 -
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Duplicate page content
hi I am getting an duplicate content error in SEOMoz on one of my websites it shows http://www.exampledomain.co.uk http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/ http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html how can i fix this? thanks darren
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Duplicate Content For Trailing Slashes?
I have several website in campaigns and I consistently get flagged for duplicate content and duplicate page titles from the domain and the domain/ versions of the sites even though they are properly redirected. How can I fix this?
Technical SEO | | RyanKelly0 -
Duplicate Content
Many of the pages on my site are similar in structure/content but not exactly the same. What amount of content should be unique for Google to not consider it duplicate? If it is something like 50% unique would it be preferable to choose one page as the canonical instead of keeping them both as separate pages?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Thin/Duplicate Content
Hi Guys, So here's the deal, my team and I just acquired a new site using some questionable tactics. Only about 5% of the entire site is actually written by humans the rest of the 40k + (and is increasing by 1-2k auto gen pages a day)pages are all autogen + thin content. I'm trying to convince the powers that be that we cannot continue to do this. Now i'm aware of the issue but my question is what is the best way to deal with this. Should I noindex these pages at the directory level? Should I 301 them to the most relevant section where actual valuable content exists. So far it doesn't seem like Google has caught on to this yet and I want to fix the issue while not raising any more red flags in the process. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DPASeo0 -
Strange duplicate content issue
Hi there, SEOmoz crawler has identified a set of duplicate content that we are struggling to resolve. For example, the crawler picked up that this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/industry-insight/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career is a duplicate of this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career. The latter page's content is the original and can be found in the CMS admin area whilst the former page is the duplicate and has no entry in the CMS. So we don't know where to begin if the "duplicate" page doesn't exist in the CMS. The crawler states that this page www. creative-choices.co.uk/industry-insight/inside/creative-writing is the referrer page. Looking at it, only the original page's link is showing on the referrer page, so how did the crawler get to the duplicate page?
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0