Why does SEOmoz bot see duplicate pages despite I am using the canonical tag?
-
Hello here,
today SEOmoz bot found and marked as "duplicate content" the following pages on my website:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf
And I am wondering why considering the fact I am using on both those pages a canonical tag pointing to the main product page below:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html
Shouldn't SEOmoz bot follow the canonical directive and not report those two pages as duplicate?
Thank you for any insights I am probably missing here!
-
Thank you Peter, I got your ticket reply.
That makes perfect sense, and as Dr. Peter pointed out on a different thread:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-seomoz-bot-consider-these-as-duplicate-pages
I was discussing this issue further, I was confused by your report.
Thank you again for your help and I hope you will improve your report interface to avoid such confusion related issues in the future.
Best,
Fabrizio
-
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out to us, I replied to you in a support ticket, but I just wanted to share it everyone since I think it might be relevant to this discussion.
I looked into your campaign and it seems that this is happening because of where your canonical tags are pointing, you can see the duplicate pages by clicking on the number to the right side of the link. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3(Duplicate 1) is considered a duplicate of
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionVcPf.html?tab=mp3 (Duplicate 2)because the canonical tag for the first page is CANON1(http://screencast.com/t/tqvDZrLsyz8D) while the canonical for the second URL is CANON2 (http://screencast.com/t/FOguPJmK0).
Since the canonical tags point to different pages it is assumed that CANON1 and CANON2 are likely to be duplicates themselves.
Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:
Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,
If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
The examples you've provided actually fall into the fourth example I've listed above.Hope that helps,
Best,
Peter
SEOmoz Help Team. -
Thinking furthermore, I don't see how these pages can be considered nearly duplicate since their content is quite different:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf
Thoughts??!!
-
Nobody can tell me why SEOmoz ignore my canonical tag definitions? According to some comments on the following thread:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages
It should actually ignore pages with a canonical tag and NOT mark them as duplicate, but in my experience (as explained above), that's not been the case.
-
Ok, thank you, now I get the point... then here is my next question: is there a way to tell SEOmoz bot to ignore duplicate page with a defined canonical tag? If not, the SEOmoz duplicate page report is useless for me. I am not interested to know about duplicate page for which I have already defined a canonical tag for.
Thanks!
-
Canonical lets you pick which of the duplicates will be indexed. But Google still has to crawl the other pages when they could be crawling other parts of your site. It's an opportunity cost. If you can accept slower crawls, you can ignore the issue.
-
I am sorry, but I don't understand your point. If two pages are similar, we can use the canonical tag to "consolidate" them and avoid duplicate issues. Am I right? Or what are canonical tags for?
-
While I agree that SEOMOZ should better categorize duplicates that are canonical, the reason they still tell you it's duplicate is crawl budget. Remember, Google still has to crawl these duplicate pages and they could be crawling something else instead. Canonical only helps by letting you pick which duplicate content gets indexed. It's better to not have duplicate content than to have canonical duplicates.
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
-
Best use of Canonical Tag with Mini-Websites
Hello, I was wondering what the best way would be to implement Canonical Tags in kind of a unusual situation. The company I work for creates single property websites for real estate agents. We register a URL such as 123MainSt.com - however through DNS we redirect that to a path. For example: http://www.944milmadadr.com would redirect to: https://www.qwikvid.com/realestate/go/v1/home/?idx=wDg1Gdwt7wnQiR3LMeCx28qPnWTKM0JV If we wanted to rank high in the search engines for our clients: "944 Milmada Dr" - Would it be the best practice to Canonical: http://www.944milmadadr.com ? Thanks in advance for any feedback on this!! Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Qwikvid0 -
Duplicate H1 Question & Landing Page help
Hi We have 2 H1's on this page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/heavy-duty-shelving Our webmaster has put one as display:none - but isn't this just going to look like we're keyword spamming & trying to hide it? OK now I;m looking I am seeing more wrong with this page... The width buttons at the top as h2's...& they link to facet pages? Won't this just waste crawl budget? and every product title/user guide title etc are all H2's.... I just need to put a plan together to give to our dev team on what should be updated Any tips would be great. Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate content issue with pages that have navigation
We have a large consumer website with several sections that have navigation of several pages. How would I prevent the pages from getting duplicate content errors and how best would I handle SEO for these? For example we have about 500 events with 20 events showing on each page. What is the best way to prevent all the subsequent navigation pages from getting a duplicate content and duplicate title error?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Use Nonindex or Canonical on product tags of a e-commerce site
I run a e-commerce site and we have many product tags. These product tags come up as "Duplicate Page Content" when Moz does it's crawl. I was wondering if I should use Nonindex or Canonical? The tags all go to the same product when used so I figure I would just nonindex them but was wondering what's the best for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EmmettButler1 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Duplicate pages with http and https
Hi all, We changed the payment part of our site to https from http a while ago. However once on the https pages, all the footer and header links are relative URLs, so once users have reached the payment pages and then re-navigate back to other pages in our website they stay on https. The build up of this happening has led to Google indexing all our pages in https (something we did not want to happen), and now we are in the situation where our homepage listing on Google is https rather than http. We would prefer the organic listings to be http (rather than https) and having read lots on this (included the great posts on the moz (still feels odd not refering to it as seomoz!) blog around this subject), possible solutions include redirects or a canoncial tags. My additional questions around these options are: 1. We already have 2 redirects on some pages (long story), will another one negatively impact our rankings? 2. Is a canonical a strong enough hint to Google to stop Google indexing the https versions of these page to the extent that out http pages will appear in natural listings again? If anyone has any other suggestions or other ideas of how to address this issue, that would be great! Thanks 🙂 Diana
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Diana.varbanescu0 -
Canonical tags required when redirecting?
Hello, My client bought a new domain and he wants it to be the main domain of his company. His current domain though has been online for 10 years and ranks pretty well on a few keywords. I feel it is necessary to redirect the old domain to the new one to take advantage of its ranking and avoid any broken links. The sites are exactly the same. Same sections and same content. Is it necessary to place canonical tags on one of the sites to avoid duplicate content/sites? Any thoughts? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan0 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0