Crawl Errors and Duplicate Content
-
SEOmoz's crawl tool is telling me that I have duplicate content at "www.mydomain.com/pricing" and at "www.mydomain.com/pricing.aspx". Do you think this is just a glitch in the crawl tool (because obviously these two URL's are the same page rather than two separate ones) or do you think this is actually an error I need to worry about? Is so, how do I fix it?
-
There are two aspects to the issue:
1. Resolve the cause of the problem. Crawl your site, locate any links to alternate URLs and change the links on your site to use the correct version of the URL.
2. Add a 301 redirect from /bad-url to /good-url. This will ensure any link juice to the bad urls is retained, along with providing a good user experience.
-
You would add the canonical tag to your existing page.
You need to decide how you wish your page to be listed.
Those are two different URLs. They COULD lead to two different pages, but you are choosing to have them lead to the same page, which is a very standard practice. You need to let search engines know how you want the page to be listed. The URL without the .aspx extension is the friendlier URL. I would suggest choosing that one but it is up to you.
-
What page should I add the canonical tag to. From my research a canonical tag in function operates in a similar way to the 301 redirect. However I only have one content page even though it has two URL's. Do I need to create literally two different versions of this content and put the canonical tag on the unwanted page?
-
Hmm, I don't understand this. If a server can detect that these two URLs are the same why can't Google's billion dollar algorithm detect that these are the same?
-
This is not a glitch in the crawl tool. It is something that needs to be fixed.
As Cody suggested, search engines will not understand which URL is correct and any link credit can wind up being split.
Adding a canonical tag to your page will resolve the issue.
I would also examine the crawl report and look at the Referrer to determine if you have any links to the undesired page.
-
The thing is, in the eyes of a crawler, they are different pages, just like http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com are the same page, but the crawlers will see them as different pages.
Are you using URL rewriting to get rid of the extension? If so I could see where this might cause a canonicalization issue if you don't tell the search engines which page you want to be ranked by using rel=canonical or redirecting from pricing.aspx to pricing.
Try using OSE on pricing and then pricing.html and see if you get different statistics.
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
-
URL slash creating duplicate content
Hi All, I currently have an issue whereby by domain name (just homepage) has: mydomain.com and: mydomain.com/ Moz crawler flags this up as duplicate content - does anyone know of a way I can fix this? Thanks! Jack
Technical SEO | | Jack11660 -
404 crawl errors ending with your domain name??
Hello, I have a crawl test with numerous 404 errors ending with my domain name..? Not sure what the cause is. Plugins? Ecommerce? I use Wordpress if that could lead to an answer. Thanks for your time. K
Technical SEO | | Hydraulicgirl0 -
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Duplicate content - font size and themes
Hi, How do we sort duplicate content issues with: http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/ being the same as http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/StyleType=SmallFont&StyleClass=FontSize or http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/?StyleType=LargeFont&StyleClass=FontSize and http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/legal_notices.aspx being the same as http://www.ourwebsite.co.uk/legal_notices.aspx?theme=default
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
SEO with duplicate content for 3 geographies
The client would like us to do seo for these 3 sites http://www.cablecalc.com/ http://www.solutionselectrical.com.au http://www.calculatecablesizes.co.uk/ The sites have to targetted in US, Australia, and UK resoectively .All the above sites have identical content. Will Google penalise the sites ? Shall we change the content completly ? How do we approach this issue ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi within my campaigns i get an error "crawl errors found" that says duplicate page content found, it finds the same content on the home pages below. Are these seen as two different pages? And how can i correct these errors as they are just one page? http://poolstar.net/ http://poolstar.net/Home_Page.php
Technical SEO | | RouteAccounts0 -
Question about duplicate content within my site
Hi. New here to SEOmoz and also somewhat new to SEO in general. A friend has asked me to help do some onsite SEO for their company's website. The company uses Drupal Content Management System. They have a couple product pages that contain a tabbed section for features, accessories, etc. When they built their tabs, they used a Drupal module called Quicktabs, by which each individual tab is created as a separate page and then pulled into the tabs from those pages. So, in essence, you now have instances of repeated content. 1) the page used to create the tab, and 2) the tab that displays on the product page. My question is, how should I handle the pages that were used to create the tabs? Should I make them NOINDEX? Thank you for your advice in advance.
Technical SEO | | aprilm-1890400 -
Duplicate content and URL's
Hi Guys, Hope you are all well. Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy 🙂 I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes. Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL. Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page? Thank you for your help guys your legends!! Cheers Wayne
Technical SEO | | wazza19850