What is Considered Duplicate Content by Crawlers?
-
I am asking this because I have a couple of site audit tools that I use to crawl a site I work on every week and they are showing duplicate content issues (which I know there is a lot on this site) but some of what is flagged as duplicate content makes no sense.
For example, the following URL's were grouped together as duplicate content:
|
https://www.firefold.com/contact-us
|
| https://www.firefold.com/sale |
|
|
How are these pages duplicate content? I am confused on what site audit tools are considering duplicate content.
Just FYI, this is data from Moz crawl diagnostics but SEMrush site auditor is giving me the same type of data.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Ryan
-
Yea I just started working on this site. I haven't used Moz Analytics much so just wanting to see how their crawler crawls pages.
And yes I agree, there are a lot of BIG BIG BIG issues with this site.
I got a large workload over the next few months haha.
-
I would add that there's is no text on any of those three pages - any "text" one would see there is actually just embedded in an image - which is a huge issue for a number of reasons:
- Search engines see that there's no text - a big no-no.
- You're getting practically no SEO value from the content that would be there, even if there isn't much.
- It's heavier this way - which makes load times slower.
I want to clarify that there are many, bigger issues with these pages - but as your question concerns only duplicate content, I'll leave all of that out for the time being. To summarize, Google, Yahoo, and Bing are just seeing some duplicate banners, sidebars, etc. and then some images in the body of your pages. Hence, duplicate content.
-
Thanks for that information.
It makes sense looking at the data and pages from that perspective.
-
Hi Ryan!
Our crawler will flag pages that have at least 90% similarity in the entire source code of the site so not just the body.
The way you want to interpret the report is the contact-us page has 35 duplicates, so "gabe" and "sale" are not dupes of each other in this section but are only each a duplicate of "contact-us". Those URLs might appear with their own duplicates of the same pages further down in the report.
While on the front end the pages do not appear to be similar. The issue is likely with the amount of javascript code on those pages.
Our crawler cannot read javascript so we are likely only able to see the template of the page. Other search tools are probably seeing the same thing as it returns 79% similarity using this tool: http://www.freebulkseotools.com/similar-page-checker-tool.php
I can't provide much insight from a dev perspective but hope this helps!
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
-
Why do my Moz duplicate content results show me pages with no noticeably similar content?
Sometimes the "Pages with Duplicate Content" results under Content Issues show pages that, from what I'm able to see or otherwise test, have no duplicate content, save for the same navigation that exists on all of my pages. For example, a recent issue said that the following pages had duplicate content:
Moz Bar | | rickmic
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/html/slider-overlay
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/ufaqs/what-do-i-get-with-my-purchase-of-freezerworks
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/videos/fda-and-freezerworks-2
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/lims-testing-module Even a side-by-side of the page source in a text comparison tool shows nothing but navigation and scripts used in every page. Am I not seeing something?2 -
Trying to duplicate Screaming Frog report
I am trying to use the crawl report to generate the Screaming Frog report shown below. I want to use it to calculate the internal page rank as Paul Shapiro outlined in this article. Google is not seeing my site the way I want them to and I want to work on the site heirarchy and structure. I am not seeing where: Type, Anchor, and Alt are listed in the crawl report - is it called something else? Is there another report I can run for the whole site to generate the data above? Does the Moz PA already calculate the internal PR of pages? Any additional resources or people that could help me with this? Thanks, SAM
Moz Bar | | SammyT0 -
Moz Content --- for SEO or simply user engagement?
What is the primary function of Moz Content? It looks like it is most useful for managing content as a user engagement tool. Our content strategy is centered on boosting organic placement - with user engagement as a nice but unessential side product. Besides providing general descriptive details of a site's content / authorship - how can Moz Content help with SEO?
Moz Bar | | cvonhassell0 -
Moz crawler finding my homepage multiple times
Hi and thank you in advance for your help! I have a Moz Pro campaign running (I am a complete Moz novice by the way) for one of my websites (balloonsutah.com). After crawling my site, the Moz crawler informed me that I have 3 pages with duplicate content. While I am not sure why exactly this is happening, the crawler indexed my homepage 3 times under different url's. -balloonsutah.com
Moz Bar | | Keenan-Price
-balloonsutah.com/
-balloonsutah.com/index.html I checked my FTP server and I cannot figure out for the life of me why the crawler is finding anything other than the index.html file. I suppose I need to do something regarding a rel="Canonical" but I am not terribly familiar with that either. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Keenan0 -
Moz Crawl Test Tool - SEO Web Crawler showing up with no details
So basically I have ran the Moz Crawl Test tool twice for this url "bubblingwithenergy.info" and both times the report has listed 1 URL when there is obviously a lot more if you check the site. My question is, why is the Moz Crawl only reporting 1 URL when there are heaps? Is there a possibility it is being blocked and if so what would be blocking it? This website is using a CMS called Infusion and it is based off CMSMS (CMS Made Simple). Any answers would be greatly appreciated. Cheers
Moz Bar | | KBB_Digital0 -
Moz Crawl Showing Duplicate Content But It's Not?!
Unfortunately I can't give out the URL, but here's the deal... I have two URL's which have completely different content on them but are being crawled as duplicate content. Any Idea how that would happen? I'm not seeing any errors in WMT's. Has anyone seen this before? Is the duplicate content reporting based on a % of the page content matching as the same?
Moz Bar | | Swarm-SEO0 -
My 301 Error and Duplicate Title Content Issue is Growing !
When i redirect some of my page - it shows error. not redirecting and i made this 3-4 months before, no effect. All Errors under each category make me gone sick.
Moz Bar | | Esaky0