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
-
Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
Moz Pro | | NichGunn0 -
Duplicate content report - question on best practice
Hello all, New to MOZ Pro and SEO - so lots to get my head round! I’m working through the Duplicate Content section of the Crawl report and am not sure what the best practice is for my situation. Background: We are a reference guide for luxury hotels around the world, but the hotels that are featured on the site vary year on year. When we add a new hotel page, it sets up the url as ourwebsite.com/continent/country/regionORcity/hotel. When the hotels come off, I redirect their URL to the country or region where we have other hotels. Example: http://www.johansens.com/europe/switzerland/zermatt/ The hotel in Zermatt has come off the site, showing 0 results on this landing page. Question: My duplicate content report is showing a number of these regional pages that are displaying the copy “0 places - Region’ because the hotel has come off, but the landing page is still live. Should I redirect the regional page back to the main country page? And then if I add a new hotel to the site from that region in the future, simply remove the redirect? Should I also delete the page? Any tips would be much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | CN_Johansens0 -
Duplicate pages coming from links from the login page - what should we do about them?
This is a follow on to an earlier question which was well answered by Dirk Ceuppens regarding abnormal crawl issues. We are seeing that the issues relating to Duplicate Pages are coming from links from the login page which shows information about where the user was redirected from. For example, if the visitor is not logged on and wishes to wish-list an item, they will be redirected to the login page, with the item code and intended action in the url; which can then continue on to the desired page once logged on. The MOZ crawler is seeing these pages as having Duplicated Content whilst they are all the same apart from a piece of information in the URL. Should we be blocking these duplications? Are they a risk to us? What should we be doing? Many thanks, Sarah
Moz Pro | | Mutatio_Digital0 -
Why are there significant changes in the amount of duplicate content without any known action?
I've noticed a surprisingly rapid change in duplicate content over the past month. I'd noticed ~6,000 instances of duplicate content, after disavowing bad links we went down to 3k, this makes perfect sense to me. But after that, without doing anything whatsoever, from last Thursday, the 20th, to yesterday the instances of duplicate content decreased again down to 2k. Could this just be a delayed indexing of pages or are there other factors here? Thanks for the help.
Moz Pro | | allurez0 -
My moz only one page was crawled
I recently moved my shopping cart from one provider to another and today moz only crawled one page, could this be because maybe google has not indexed it yet or should i be concerned? I pointed the DNS at the new cart monday night if that helps. I would have expected it to be indexed by now
Moz Pro | | SmartVapes0 -
On-Page Report Card Questions
First post here, a couple questions as I work through some of the SEOMOZ tool reporting, specifically the On-page Report Card. I've just received the report results yesterday, so working through the data now. There are two issues categorized as critical by the tool: (1) The grader is stating I don't have any instances of the target keyword in my page title, yet it's there. (The page title is too long, but I'm in the process of hacking the blog software to fix this, it's auto-generated by the CMS.) (2) It's also saying under "Broad Keyword Usage in Document" that I have zero instances of the keyword in the body text, and while I certainly don't have enough, there is at least one instance at the bottom of the blog post. All the text is contained with tags. (3) Related to #2, what's the difference between "Appropriate Keyword Usage in Document" under "High Importance Factors" and "Broad Keyword Usage in Document" under "Critical Factors"
Moz Pro | | webranger0 -
On Page Analysis and Grading
I am new here and happy to be! My site is an ecommerce site with hundreds of products. I have set up campaigns to track specific products. For the on page analysis where SEOMOZ gives you a grade I have 2 urls showing. But 1 of the urls is getting an A, and 1 is getting a F. But they are the same url and obviously go to the same page. Any help would be appreciated!
Moz Pro | | Confections0 -
Duplicate page content and search in Magento
Hi all, Firstly, I am a business owner and not a SEO genuis but I work on my site and am learning how to "tweek" everyday. That said, my site www.vintagetimes.com.au needs a bit more than a tweek. Here is problem 1: I have massive duplicate page content which is being driven primarily by search and I'm not sure how to tackle the issue. Working in Magento. Could anybody give me an instruction on how to steer robots away from search results? I would also like to know WHY a search result is here as well? Example of about 20 pages of this type of result: | Search results for: '1 carat' Vintage Times http://www.vintagetimes.com.au/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=1+carat&enable_googlecheckout=1 50+ 1 0 Search results for: '1 carat' Vintage Times http://www.vintagetimes.com.au/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=1+carat&enable_googlecheckout=1&cat=21 50+ 1 0 Search results for: '1 carat' Vintage Times http://www.vintagetimes.com.au/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=1+carat&enable_googlecheckout=1&cat=21&order=created_at&dir=asc 50+ 1 0 Search results for: '1 carat' Vintage Times http://www.vintagetimes.com.au/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=1+carat&enable_googlecheckout=1&cat=21&order=metal&dir=asc 50+ 1 0 Search results for: '1 carat' Vintage Times http://www.vintagetimes.com.au/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=1+carat&enable_googlecheckout=1&cat=21&order=name&dir=asc 50+ 1 0 Search results for: '1 carat' Vintage Times http://www.vintagetimes.com.au/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=1+carat&enable_googlecheckout=1&cat=21&order=price&dir=asc 50+ 1 0 Search results for: '1 carat' Vintage Times http://www.vintagetimes.com.au/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=1+carat&enable_googlecheckout=1&cat=21&order=relevance&dir=asc 50+ 1 0 Search results for: '1 carat' Vintage Times http://www.vintagetimes.com.au/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=1+carat&enable_googlecheckout=1&cat=21&order=stone&dir=asc | 50+ | 1 | 0 |
Moz Pro | | VintageTimesAustralia0