Are my duplicate meta titles and descriptions an issue ?
-
HelloMy website http://www.gardenbeet.com has been rebuilt using prestacart and there are 158 duplicate title and meta descriptions being reported by google.My developer advised the following Almost all the duplicates are due to the same page being accessible at the root and following the category heading. e.g;
/75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html
/patio-planters/75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.htmlThis is hard-wired into PrestaShop. Was the Canonical module (now disabled) responsible for the confusion by not including the category name?
The Googlebot shouldn't be scanning the root versions now. I don't believe this to be a serious issue but I'd recommend a second opinion from someone more SEO savvy just to be sure.Opinions??
-
thanks - i dont know why it was disabled - it probably caused another problem - we have had many!! will give reply to developer and see what he says
appreciate your time
-
Hey, you essentially have two URLs pointing to exactly the same page so you have an issue here. Exactly why prestashop is configured like that I don't know but it's certainly not going to help you long term and you need to get this sorted.
I guess you have a couple of options.
1. Reconfigure prestashop so it only maintains one unique URL for each page & 301 redirect the ones you remove to the new one to pick up any search referrals and transfer any link value
2. add a canonical URL to both versions of the page pointing to the main version of the page.
I just did a quick google and this seems to be an oft discussed topic on the prestashop forums so there is likely a tried and tested solution out there. As this is specific to that content management system I would suggest looking there for the solution as there is likely something you can do in the configuration of prestashop to sort this out.
You mentioned that you disabled the canonical plugin - why was this? Was it pointing to the correct versions of the pages (the categorised ones)? If so, putting that back in place may solve the issue and I would be happy to take a look under at the source code for you to confirm this.
Not exactly an answer, but I think the answer is likely simple and in the prestashop configuration of the disabled canonical module.
Let me know if I can help!
Marcus
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
-
Drupal Domain Access SEO Issues
I'm working with a new developer to redesign several Drupal sites and have 3-4 sites with similar designs and modules. The developer is keen on using Drupal Domain Access to make maintenance and sharing user information easier. Each site currently has a unique domain and content (although the sites are in related niches). Are there issues from an SEO perspective with the Drupal Domain Access Module? With only one instance of Drupal on the backend will Google somehow not view these as independent sites? Thanks for any info!
Web Design | | talltrees0 -
Curious why site isn't ranking, rather seems like being penalized for duplicate content but no issues via Google Webmaster...
So we have a site ThePowerBoard.com and it has some pretty impressive links pointing back to it. It is obviously optimized for the keyword "Powerboard", but in no way is it even in the top 10 pages of Google ranking. If you site:thepowerboard.com the site, and/or Google just the URL thepowerboard.com you will see that it populates in the search results. However if you quote search just the title of the home page, you will see oddly that the domain doesn't show up rather at the bottom of the results you will see where Google places "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed". If you click on the link below that, then the site shows up toward the bottom of those results. Is this the case of duplicate content? Also from the developer that built the site said the following: "The domain name is www.thepowerboard.com and it is on a shared server in a folder named thehoverboard.com. This has caused issues trying to ssh into the server which forces us to ssh into it via it’s ip address rather than by domain name. So I think it may also be causing your search bot indexing problem. Again, I am only speculating at this point. The folder name difference is the only thing different between this site and any other site that we have set up." (Would this be the culprit? Looking for some expert advice as it makes no sense to us why this domain isn't ranking?
Web Design | | izepper0 -
W3C My site has 157 Errors, 146 warning(s) Is it an issue?
Is having this number of W3C errors & warnings an issue and will be impacting my site's performance? When the site was built 6 months ago my developers told me that it "was nothing to worry about", but I have read that any errors aren't good, let alone the huge number my site has? Your advice please Thanks Ash
Web Design | | AshShep10 -
Does meta "Expires" tag affect website cacheing or indexing?
One of our client has a meta expire tag across all pages of their website. Does that tag affect the website overall caching or indexing? Their website pages including home page is crawled every 10 days, however the website is popular high traffic websites, receiving 240,000 visits/month. Please advise what impact this tag will have on the website indexing and caching? Thanks Atomic Team
Web Design | | JamesDixon700 -
ECWID How to fix Duplicate page content and external link issue
I am working on a site that has a HUGE number of duplicate pages due to ECWID ecommerce platform. The site is built with Joomla! How can I rectify this situation? The pages also show up as "external " links on crawls... Is it the ECWID platform? I have never worked on a site that uses this. Here is an example of a page with the issue (there are 6280 issues) URL: http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spare-parts?Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560081
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
How To Avoid Duplicate Content
We are an eCommerce site for autoparts. It is basically impossible to avoid duplicate content, and I think we are getting penalized by Google for it. Here is why it is impossible. Let's say I sell a steering rack for a 2000 Honda Accord. I need an SEO rich page for 2000 Honda Accord Steering Rack. I sell steering racks for more than 25 years of Honda Accords. I can try and make the copy different but there is no way to spin the copy that many times and make it seem like it is not duplicate copy. This even gets more complicated because I sell hundreds of parts for each year of a Honda Accord, plus a lot of times you even have to go down to the engine size of the car for the right part. I can't use a redirect, ie 301 redirect because they are not the same pages. One is for a 2000 Honda Accord and the other a 2001 Honda Accord, and so on. Is their a redirect out there that I do not know about that would help me out in this case? Also, if their is no way around this and I am getting penalized would it be better to eliminate all these pages, possibly losing my ability to rank high on searches such as "2000 Honda Accord Steering Rack," and just replace with a page that has a Year Make Model, and Part dropdown which just takes the customer a checkout page?
Web Design | | joebuilder0 -
Linking to an image with the keyword in the title and alt tags.
Hi guys, Just thought I'd ask for opinions about an ecommerce catalog I'm working on. I don't know if it's even worth worrying about, but here's the scenario. Let's say I'm linking to a category called 'Sale' using an image, I have the title tag of the link as 'Sale', the image title is also 'Sale' as well as the alt tag. The HTML looks like this: Sale The page itself is: http://www.fashionbasicsonline.com/catDisplay So my question is, do you think I'm stuffing the keyword in too many times there? It's CMS driven so I could have the alt tag as 'Sale Products' or one of the titles as 'Sale Catalog' perhaps, do you think there would be a benefit in doing that? Maybe it's microoptimisation and I should be looking at other low hanging fruit, but I'm just trying to come up with the best scenario. Would love to hear what you think. Cheers, Bruce p.s. Looking forward to meeting as many people as possible at MozCon next week 🙂
Web Design | | bruce_werdschinski0 -
Multiple Sites, multiple locations similar / duplicate content
I am working with a business that wants to rank in local searches around the country for the same service. So they have websites such as OURSITE-chicago.com and OURSITE-seattle.com -- All of these sites are selling the same services, but with small variations in each state due to different legal standards in the state. The current strategy is to put up similar "local" websites with all the same content. So the bottom line is that we have a few different sites with the same content. The business wants to go national and is planning a different website for each location. In my opinion the duplicate content is a real problem. Unfortunately the nature of the service makes it so that there aren't many ways to say the same thing on each site 50 times without duplicate content. Rewriting content for each state seems like a daunting task when you have 70+ pages per site. So, from an SEO standpoint we have considered: Using the canonocalization tag on all but the central site... I think this would hurt all of the websites SERPs because none will have unique content. Having a central site with directories OURSITE.com/chicago -- but this creates a problem because we need to link back to the relevant content in the main site and ALSO have the unique "Chicago" content easily accessable to Chicago users while having Seattle users able to access their Seattle data. The best way we thought to do this was using a frame with a universal menu and a unique state based menu... Also not a good option because of frames will also hurt SEO. Rewrite all the same content 50 times. You can see why none of these are desirable options. But I know that plenty of websites have "state maps" on their main site. Is there a way to accomplish this in a way that doesn't make our copywriter want to kill us?
Web Design | | SysAdmin190