Duplicated content detected with MOZ crawl with canonical applied
-
Hi there!
I have a slight problem.
I have a site with Joomla 3.3 that we recently migrated from 2.5.Joomla, for some reason that I don´t really get, creates hundreds of weird urls for the site like
mydomain.com/en -> joomla creates en/home/149-xxx-xxx/xxxxxx-xxxxxx that links to the first one.
The new version 3.3 knows this bug and applies a rel=canonical to the ones created "artificially", so they should not be identified as duplicated.Sample piece of code: en/home/149-all-en/xxxxxxx-xxxxxx" rel="canonical" /
MOZ crawler identifies this as duplicated and like this I have thousands of pages duplicated all with titles, content etc... all the ones created by joomla. Still my site has good SEO results and I can not see any penalties but I am a bit concerned they may come in the future....
Can anyone explain me what is happening?
Thank you in advance for your time,
-
If it's a period of 2 weeks and you're going to do it anyways, I would just make the new content and not go to the expense of setting up redirects and then taking them down, which can cause issues when you plan on recreating a URL.
-
Thank you for your time!
We are going to setup 301 redirects (one colleague suggested importing those directly in the DB of redirects) from those duplicated pages until joomla has a native solution and we have the time to make all unique content, to avoid penalties.
At least, we would solve temporaly the problem, it will take 2 weeks to make all the unique content.
Would that make sense?
Have a nice weekend!
-
I personally would not generate new language sections unless the content has been translated and localized on those pages. Right now your Spanish homepage has English content in the body, so I would view this as incomplete. Ideally you'd translate the entire page for those sections.
When you do that, you'll want to use hreflang, not canonicals, to indicate different versions of the same content.
So, my recommendation is (A) get rid of the Spanish content sections which would solve the duplication problem, or (B) finish translating the content and then install hreflang code, which would also solve the duplication problem.
Unfortunately I don't know of a good hreflang tool for Joomla specifically.
Let me know if that makes sense?
-
Thank you Kane.
I would like to keep the content in all the languages, ,as I think it is useful for customers to enter easily certain areas.
The problem that I am always having is the implementation...There are not real good canonical plugins (that would allow me to do a bulk import), and I am not that advanced as for doing an htaccess redirect with 301... still, I would like that if someone from NL or FI version would like to find the area barcelona could see it....
Anything on mind!? Just to say, I tried SH404, does all the work but rewrites the whole url structure (not possible), I tried canonical http://www.cmsplugin.com/products/components/4-canonical-url which solves the duplication by languages but not the random urls created by 3.3...
Then I decided to leave the plugin I mentioned before, it deletes all the duplicated urls generated automatically but does not solve the language problem...So, here I am
Any suggestion?
-
Also, if you decide to keep the /es/ section of the website then you'll need to look into hreflang instead of canonical tags, because /es/ and /en/ will not be duplicate content once they're translated.
Read this Q&A from Google for details - https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q20
-
Hey Jose,
If you have an /es/ subfolder then ideally you would be translating that content to Spanish, not canonicalizing that content back to the English version.
I can see from http://www.spain-internship.com/es/internships-in-salamanca that not all /es/ pages are translated - is this true across the entire website?
If you don't have any Spanish content, then you should just kill off the /es/ version entirely.
-
Hi there,
Thanks for the update. Now that you told me the problem I found out this is a known bug for joomla and I am working on it.
I found a plugin http://styleware.eu/store/item/26-styleware-content-canonical-plugin that sends all the duplicated urls, generated automatically with a canonical to the home.Sample:
http://www.spain-internship.com/en/home/149-all-en/placement-spain
Now with the link http://www.spain-internship.com" rel="canonical" />.This solves the problem of the core canonical bug.
Would this be a proper solution?Now I only have to change all the ones duplicated due to languages config, block then in robots or canonical but as far as I control it, it is ok.
Please, let me know if this would be a proper solution.
Thank you in advance for your help, if I can help you in some moment with something here we are!
-
Ok, the problem is your pages are all canonical to themselves, the canonical tag should point at the main page for the content, not to every page. For your first example, all pages that get their content from http://www.spain-internship.com/en need to have canonical tags to that page, instead the copy page has this:
href="http://www.spain-internship.com/fi/etusivu/186-all-fi/home-page-fi" rel="canonical" />
it should have
href="http://www.spain-internship.com/fi/" rel="canonical" />
-
I will provide few so you can look!
Detected as duplicated:
http://www.spain-internship.com/en
http://www.spain-internship.com/en/home/149-all-en/placement-spainSame here:
http://www.spain-internship.com/fi
http://www.spain-internship.com/fi/etusivu/186-all-fi/home-page-fihttp://www.spain-internship.com/en/internships-in-salamanca
http://www.spain-internship.com/es/internships-in-salamancaFirst one is the original. The rest one have canonical. Still detected as duplicated.
-
Do you have an example of one of these generated pages as well, everything looks fine on the main page.
-
Hey,
Yes, sure.
This is the duplicated from the /en
http://www.spain-internship.com/en/home/149-all-en/placement-spain
Thanks!
-
Do you have a link to one of these pages so we can look at how it is deploying the canonical onto the page.
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
-
Moz DA is not improving my site DA why?
Hello Moz community, I have created a lot of high domain authority backlinks for my official service website but my DA still less than 15, why my site DA does not increase as I have created huge backlinks.
Link Explorer | | Ijiubu7680 -
Why some of my backlinks are not showing on moz
why some of my backlinks are not showing on moz. These backlinks are profile and web 2.0 backlinks, i have tried many solutions but none of them worked for me. my site is solution4people is there any way to show all the backlinks of my site on moz . Thanks alot.
Link Explorer | | tzoubaier0 -
Crawl Errors on a Wordpress Website
I am getting a 902 error, "Network Errors Prevented Crawler from Contacting Server" when requesting a site crawl on my wordpress website, https://www.systemoneservices.com. I think the error may be related to site speed and caching, but request a second opinion and potential solutions. Thanks, Rich
Link Explorer | | rweede0 -
No backlinks reporting in MOZ OSE?
We have a bunch of links and none of them report in MOZ OSE. Does the MOZ OSE tool have a cache that takes a while to refresh? We have recently moved over to CloudFlare and since the move the numbers do not add up. Here is a link to a ahrefs screenshot. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. moz.png
Link Explorer | | seanallen0070 -
Site moved to https and not showing any Moz DA or PA
Hello Fellow Mozzers, So, I have a client site that we moved from non https to https at the end of 2015. We had decent moz numbers (Da/Pa etc) but now we are only showing a 1 for both of them. Does it usually take time for Moz to carry over the info to the https version or does that process entirely start over? Not sure where to start looking. Cheers D
Link Explorer | | DarinPirkey0 -
Why is OSE showing a higher Domain Authority than Moz?
Moz has today run monthly reports for 2 of my clients' sites. For both of these, the Domain Authority reported on the Moz dashboard is several points lower than that shown by OSE today for the same sites. Why would that be?
Link Explorer | | mfrgolfgti0 -
The difference between the statistics MOZ & Ahrefs
Hello dear. I have a website for a year. I made 10K links in one year(from 45 Root Domains).the Ahrefs.com has show full list of link root domains and pages. the ahrefs rank is 49. but MOZ said my Established Links are 5! So I have some questions, please help me: 1- what is difference between MOZ rank and ahrefs rank? 2-When Just-Discovered Link Calculate for my site? 3-why my moz trust is 0.00!?How to improve it? URL: https://esta-register.org
Link Explorer | | allyunit0 -
301 Redirects: How long for Google to recognize? How long for Moz/OSE to recognize?
I redirected a few pages that had funky URL issues (capitals and underscores and useless words) to the same page renamed with proper URLs. The sitemaps were changed also, and re-submitted. Like this: mydomain.com/Not_Pertinent_Words.html >>> mydomain.com/good-words.html Google seems to have found them and changed the search engine results listing in about 8 days. But it's been about a month now and Moz and OSE still have not transferred all the strength and link data from the old URLs to the new ones. Question 1: How long does it usually take Google to transfer all the link and strength data for a 301? Question 2: How long does it take Moz and OSE to do the same? Is there something I need to do to tell them about the changes?
Link Explorer | | GregB1230