Dup Meta dscsriptions

[AlohaBruce]

I keep getting this condition in Google Webmaster Tools HTML improvements under

Duplicate meta descriptions

<a id="zip_6-anchor" class="zippedsection_title">Hawaii Vacation Blog has all the information you'll need to plan your Hawaii vacation. We have tips</a>

/blog/page/4//blog/page/4/?level=album&id=0&sortby=caption&sortdir=ASC/blog/page/4/?level=album&id=14&sortby=caption&sortdir=desc/blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=143/blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=147/blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=166/blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=171/blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=213/blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=52/blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=87

The problem is that this cannot be duplicate meta descriptions because all of this is one page.

Anyone have this situation before or can explain why Google see a single page with duplicate meta descriptions?

[Dr-Pete]

I just want to be clear - this is isn't one of those situations where I'm 60% sure from my general, anecdotal experience (I try to be up-front about that). This situation is exactly why the canonical tag was invented. Unique URLs that can be crawled are unique "pages" in Google's eyes.

Now, does that mean the URLs are necessarily causing you problems or that the canonical tag will improve things substantially? That's a much tougher question, and depends a lot on your site and any other technical SEO problems you may have. I can tell you with total confidence that I've seen it cause serious ranking problems many times. It's relatively painless and risk-free to fix, so I'd fix it 99% of the time.

If you look at Google's reference on the canonical tag:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

...you can see that the first two URLs differ only by the "sort" parameter. Yet, to Google, these are different pages. In this case, the pages may even vary slightly, but they're close enough to be seen as "near duplicates". On most of the URLs you've listed, the content seems to be identical, as far as I can tell. Only the URL is changing, so that's a very textbook duplicate content problem.

The difficult part is just how best to implement a solution in WordPress and sorting out why all of these various parameters are being crawled. There are other solutions, like Google Webmaster Tools parameter handling. It's a complex problem, and I've got a mega-post (probably the longest post I've ever written by 2X) here that shows just how tricky it can get:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

You've got a few variants, and it's always best to try solve the issues that caused them - often, this comes down to fixing internal links. In this case, though, I think properly implemented canonical tags would clean up a lot of the mess and help prevent future problems.

[AlohaBruce]

Thanks Peter,

You may be onto something with the hack observation, we were in fact hacked and our site was flagged as compromised for about 4 weeks, that has been lifted by Google and we are clean of hack injections.

Do you have any documentation to point to which validates your theory that this is a canonical issue? ? Any examples you can direct me to where someone has  had this situation which was solved by the canonical tag?

Again thanks again for helping it's much appreciated

[Dr-Pete]

I forgot that I wrote a post about this recently:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-page-is-canonical

[KyleChamp]

You worded that much better than I did, lol.

This is basically what I was trying to say in my posts below. Bruce, I hope this helps you understand the issue a bit better.

[Dr-Pete]

Kyle is right, and this is a common misunderstanding. While we think of a "page" as a an actual file, Google (and pretty much every crawler) sees a "page" as a unique URL. If content is accessible from multiple URLs, then search engines view that as multiple pages. They can't see your physical files, so they don't have a good way to know what's actually a page and what isn't. In fairness, it's even more complex than that - often single code templates will drive unique content (a page like "product.php", for example, might generate 1000s of unique product pages).

So, in Google's eyes, all of these URLs are indeed duplicates. You can see multiple indexed copies by running this command on Google:

site:hawaii-aloha.com/blog/page/4

It's possible the site was even hacked in the past. There are some weird indexed URLs, like:

/?id=sbfzcjblmfjqjon

...that Google lists as "compromised". I'm not seeing malware, but it's unclear how these URLs got crawled.

You do need some sort of canonicalization solution. I'm not a WordPress expert, but there are some decent plugins. The canonical tag actually can work here - even though it's one file, every time Google crawls a different URL (landing on that same file), the canonical will consolidate those URLs. Since this seems to be paginated search, it can be a bit tricky, though. I would highly recommend addressing the problem, as all of these copies can definitely dilute your ranking ability and hurt your site's SEO.

[AlohaBruce]

Thanks so much again Kyle & I do understand what  you're saying,

Click on the URL's above which all go  to the exact same page not separate pages, so again you an I are going in circles here,  BTW this is a Wordpress blog.

This is not a canonical issue, I understand and have use canonical tags all the time

[KyleChamp]

Lets see if I can explain this a little better. I fully understand what’s going on here but I think you have some confusion. I understand that you only created 1 page but whatever content management system your using (Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) has created multiple versions on the same page.

/blog/page/4/
 /blog/page/4/?level=album&id=0&sortby=caption&sortdir=ASC
 /blog/page/4/?level=album&id=14&sortby=caption&sortdir=desc
 /blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=143
 /blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=147
 /blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=166
 /blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=171
 /blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=213
 /blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=52
 /blog/page/4/?level=picture&id=87

You see all those URLs you posted, they are all separate pages created by your CMS from that 1 page you created. Since the URLs are different, Google treats them as individual pages. Now, if you were to add the rel="canonical" tag:

Google will then know all those other URLs are just copies of the original page and this will solve your duplicate description issue.

Alternatively, you can play around with your CMS to get it to stop creating these extra versions of the same page. (Not recommend unless you know what you’re doing)

[AlohaBruce]

I really do appreciate you guys trying to help but think you  just don't understand.  A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

We only have on ONE PAGE HERE and there is no place to direct  a canonical to!!! Also these are duplicate meta tag descriptions NOT duplicate content pages.

[cprasad]

Hi,

I also agree with Kyle. I do not know how these pages has created. But anyway all the contents are same on all the pages. So there not only duplicate meta descriptions. There you will have Duplicate Contents and maybe with penalty also from Google. And as there is no any harm by adding a canonical url, do not be late to add a canonical tag before you get more issues.

the correct canonical tag for this is

Then the other urls will not be show in Webmaster Tools. But it will take few weeks to disappear from Webmaster Tools.

Regrads

Prasad

[AlohaBruce]

Thanks, this  not a canonical issue as I understand it because  it's all the same page, canonical tag has no use here

[KyleChamp]

It looks like your CMS (Content Management System) is creating multiple pages for the same page (happens all the time). Add the  rel="canonical" tag into the section of all non-canonical versions of the page.

Example:

You can read more on the rel=”canonical” tag here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394