Duplicate Page Titles & Content
-
We have just launched a new version of a website and after running it through SEOMOZ we have over 6000 duplicate title & content errors. (awesome)
We have products that show up multiple times under different URLs however we "thought" we had implemented the rel=canonical correctly.
My question is - do these errors still show up in SEOMOZ despite the canonical tags being there OR if they were "correct" would we be getting "zero" errors?
-
Hi Ladies & Gents
It was a canonical tag error - we went from 6000 errors to 11500 errors and now after the issue was fixed we have a handful of non related errors to sort.
Really appreciate all the feedback.
Kind Regards
Liam
-
how are you getting on, did this get resolved?
-
Hey Peter, I'm just having problems with the 4th example, and I believe you are doing it wrong. Not to try to point out problems with your software, but the report that I now have is more or less unusable for my clients because you see the duplicates this way.
What we have, is duplicates reaching to different categories with canonical set up.
B references A in category 1
D references C in category 2
and hundreds more ...But, because B and D are empty, except for the navigation, the tool sees B and D as duplicates. Two problems with that:
1. They are not even "considered" by Google, because they reference something else as a canonical, so they are not duplicates of each other.
2. The report now shows 10 different pages from different categories as duplicates, and with the number of false identified duplicates it is now impossible for me to find any real duplicates.So, is my understanding wrong, and what can we do to find the really duplicated pages?
Thanks,
-
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out to us! I'm sorry if there are any confusions regarding the way we classify duplicate content. Just clarify a few things, 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.For more information on using canonical tags, check out this great post by our very own Dr. Pete:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsI hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Best,
Peter
SEOmoz Help Team. -
Thanks for the responses - sort of what I feared but haven't implemented canonical tags before so was unsure whether they should be showing.
Looks like there is a long day ahead
-
I am afraid i don’t know the detailed ins and outs of SEOMozs products, however we have some paginated pages on one of our sites. Our crawl reports are not showing errors for duplicate page titles and they are detailed in the notices section as canonical.
This implies to me that the crawl reports do ignore correctly formatted canonical tags. Perhaps you could download the error list and the list of discovered canonical tags and compare the two to confirm. Alternately try crawling the site with other tools, the one i would recommend is Screaming Frog as this will allow you to filter canonical tags in the reports, and do it for free.
-
Hi,
All things being equal, if the canonical tags are properly implemented you should see zero.
For ecomm sites, it is pretty easy to get duplicate title and content warnings from similar but not identical product pages which is usually an indication of thin content (no descriptions or one line descriptions that are almost identical).
So first line of enquiry is to confirm the canonicals are really doing what you expect them to be doing and if after the next crawl you still see duplicate issues then download them in a csv and start investigating them to see which pages are being flagged.
Hope that 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
-
Moz is treating my pages as duplicate content but the pages have different content in reality
Attached here is a screenshot of links with duplicate content. Here are some links that is also based on the screenshot http://federalland.ph/construction_updates/paseo-de-roces-as-of-october-2015 http://federalland.ph/construction_updates/sixsenses-residences-tower-2-as-of-october-2015/ http://federalland.ph/construction_updates/sixsenses-residences-tower-3-as-of-october-2015 The links that I have placed here have different content. So I don't why they are treated as duplicates BWWJuvQ
Moz Pro | | clestcruz0 -
Problem with On-page
I have an issue. I have added 5 keywords but when i go to the "on page" tab. They are not there... So i press on "Add keyword" and it takes me to another page where i can see all my keywords. So i go back to the "on page" and no keyword shows up. I wanna have a summary of the weekly crawl for the on page of these keywords and it's not showing up 😞 Anybody knows why?
Moz Pro | | theseolab0 -
One page report are empty !
Hi Rodgerbot, Now, i've no seomoz one page report for any campaign 😞 What happen ? I've previously several report. Thanks,
Moz Pro | | Max840 -
Pages Crawled: 1 Why?
I have some campaigns which have only 1 page crawled, while some other campaigns, having completely similar URL (subdomain) and number of keywords and pages, have all pages crawled... Why is that so? It has been also a while I waited and so far no change...
Moz Pro | | BritishCouncil0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title - Miva - How to fix?
Hi, I'm new to SEOmoz and just diving into it. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. I use Miva Merchant as my storefront interface. SEMOz is returning a bunch of duplicate page content and duplicate page titles and I can't figure out what to do about it. It seems it may have something to do with Miva shortlinks. I click on the dup URL's in SEMOz and it brings me to a dead page. I can't figure out where it's coming from. I know without seeing the actual information it'll probably be tough to help me but any suggestions would be appreciated. I try to fix them and come to a point (after about three hours of getting nowhere) it becomes too frustrating. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | musicforkids
Gary0 -
Only 1 page has been crawled. Why?
I set a new profile up a fortnight ago. Last week seomoz crawled the entire site (10k pages), and this week has only crawled 1 page. Nothing's changed on the site that I'm aware of, so what's happened?
Moz Pro | | tompollard0 -
& VS & - Title too long?
It seems that SEO Moz inturprets & as the html ascii character code: & in my titles. This is pushing the titles over the limit by 1 or 2 characters in some cases. Does this matter? does google actually treat & the same way? or is this an SEO Moz bug?
Moz Pro | | adriandg1 -
Redirecting duplicate .asp pages??
Hi all, I have a bit of a problem with duplicate content on our website. The CMS has been creating identical duplicate pages depending on which menu route a user takes to get to a product (i.e. via the side menu button or the top menu bar). Anyway, the web design company we use are sorting it out going forward, and creating 301 redirects on the duplicate pages. My question is, some of the duplicates take two different forms. E.g. for the home page: www.<my domain="">.co.uk
Moz Pro | | gdavies09031977
www..<my domain="">.co.uk/index.html
www.<my domain="">.co.uk/index.asp</my></my></my> Now I understand the 'index.html' page should be redirected, but does the 'index.asp' need to be directed also? What makes this more confusing is when I run the SEOMoz diagnostics report (which brought my attention to the duplicate content issue in the first place - thanks SEOMoz), not all the .asp pages are identified as duplicates. For example, the above 'index.asp' page is identified as a duplicate, but 'contact-us.asp' is not highlighted as a duplicate to 'contact-us.html'? I'm a bit new to all this (I'm not a IT specialist), so any clarification anyone can give would be appreciated. Thanks, Gareth0