Why is the exact same URL being seen as duplicate and showing an error in my SEO reports
-
Well, I am still having duplicate page issues.
I have a question about one of the errors SEO is giving me when I download a crawl report. I am going to attach a screen shot of part of the report so you can see for yourself, along with explaining it here.
SEO shows the list of URL's that it crawled in the report. In this(see attachment) portion of the report it has 321 results for the exact same URL. It also says all of these exact same URL's have received a 404 error. What I want to know is how does it make 321 results for the same URL? And with this error that I don't see when I look at the page?
-
Hey Josh,
You may want to speak with your developer on this one PHP is a server language and could be generating the unique pages and causing Roger to crawl twice depending on which way he approaches the page. I apologize for the delay here as I was not receiving notifications on this post.
-
I think it does so by PHP. Is there any easy way I can make sure?
-
Hey Josh,
Rogerbot discovered this link through the /blog/ subfolder on your page which led him to the which battery post. By any chance does the auto forward do so by PHP or Javascript? Sometimes Roger can get a little hung up on these pages and think they don't exist.
Let me know either way so we can get this taken care of!
Thanks
-
Ok I get which page it is now but I do not understand the issue. There isnt a direct link to that blog post from any of the other pages crawled. And if you use either link they both work. The Column a link however does auto forward to the MaxAmps site equivalent page. Could it somehow have to do with this?
-
Hey Josh,
This is James from Moz Help. I'd like to see if I can assist in diagnosing this problem. I had a chance to pull your crawl .CSV and the 321 pages you have in column F are actually the referring pages the actual page we crawled will be in Column A. Essentially the What Battery Can we MaxAmps Build for You has 321 unique pages it links too. While this page does not 404 it seems Roger can not get to the pages after this.
Feel free to follow up here or send us a message to help@moz.com
Have a great day!
-
Okay I will be sure to try and implement this to the blog.
You seem to know how a php dynamic site builds itself from one page. May I ask you another question? We have been going through this duplicate page problem for a long time. I generally get the answer to redirect or canonical the pages. I understand how I can do this to our blog as it is in word press. However, the rest of our site is not. The category section of our page, for instance, generates depending on how the person gets there from one single page of coding. And that is for all of our categories, not just one. How can I implement a redirect or canonical to this type of site. I would not want all of the categories to lead to one particular category. So if I put the canonical tag in my category page with a single url than that won't work. Also if I use a redirct in this page it will still lead me to only one category (correct?) instead of the people having the option to go to several different categories.
-
Hi Josh,
By chance does this url have parameters. Those may not be reporting properly in this report. That would be my first thought. I have seen that frequently in blog / forum crawls, as those usually have many parameters for starting at a certain post number. The simple solution is to just rel canonical the page to its root.
As for the 404 error I would guess that some page is generated or linking to urls with certain parameters that the page itself doesn't know how to handle.
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
-
How To Stop Moz Crawl From Prepending /blog/ on all our site urls that it crawls
Hello, At some time in the past our WP site had urls like this: www.oursite.com/blog/post-title-pretty-link The site has not used that url structure for quite some time, but Moz crawl is still hitting every post with /blog/prepended and as a result is generating thousands of 404s. When the /blog/ is removed from the url, then the urls work fine. Where are those old urls being stored and how can we update them? How do we address this issue? Any assistance will be appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Bar | | dbcooper1 -
How can i fix? some information is wrong on the report.
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis/flags?subdomain=bassinotary.com hi please advice. please see the link to my spam report. some information is wrong. like no email address or social profile link found I have already had links on that page and email and address and schema.org is in place. please help thanks.
Moz Bar | | grbassi0 -
Should I be concerned our FWE Mentions report shows tons of non-relevant results?
Our brand name also happens to be a common German word and when I ran FWE for the first time this week, I was surprised to see hundreds of returns for the German word rather than our brand name. Does this affect our SEO in anyway and if so, what can we do to mitigate this? Appreciate any insights! Thanks in advance.
Moz Bar | | karrabarron0 -
Canonical in Moz crawl report
I'm wondering if the moz bot is seeing my rel="canonical" on my pages. There are 2 notices that are bothering me: Overly Dynamic URL Rel Canonical Overly Dynamic URL - This notice is being generated by urls with query strings. On the main page I have the rel="canonical" tag in the header. So every page with the query string has the canonical tag that points to the page that should be indexed. So my question...Why the notice? Isn't this being handled properly with the canonical tag? I know I can use my robots.txt or the tool in Google search console but is it really necessary when I have the canonical on every page? Here is one of the links that has the "Overly Dynamic URL" notice, as you can see the the canonical in the header points to the page without the query string: https://www.vistex.com/services/training/traditional-classroom/registration-form/?values=true&course-title=DMP101 – Data Maintenance Pricing – Business Processes&date=March 14, 2016 Rel Canonical - Every page in my report has this notice "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical". I'm using the rel="canonical" tag on all of my pages by default. Is the report suggesting that I don't do this? Or is it suggesting that I should? Again...why the notice?
Moz Bar | | Brando160 -
Do exact keyword matches exclude "in", "based" etc?
I am trying to build a landing page for the search term "web design london" and I have included this search term as well as some variations such as "web design in london", "web design based in london" as the content doesn't really read well if I don't put in a connector word (I can't remember what the term for the use of "in" etc is). However I am using the Moz On-Page Grader to make sure I'm dotting every i and crossing every t, but it doesn't seem to pick up on the search term when "in" or "based" is used. Now is this a limitation of the On-Page Grader or should I expect Google and other search engines to not pick up on the search term when it contains these sorts of words?
Moz Bar | | mickburkesnr0 -
Learn how to use MozBar to analyze competitors' schema markup. Get you Daily SEO Fix!
Schema markup helps Google and Bing identify what your (and your competitors') website pages are all about and as a result, helps search engines better index them. Better indexing can lead to better rankings for relevant keywords and phrases and herein lies the opportunity. In today's Daily SEO FiX, Jordan shows you how to use MozBar to analyze the schema markup of the competition and optimize your own site and pages for rich snippets. If you don't have MozBar, no worries! You may download it for free here. This video is part of The Moz Daily SEO Fix tutorial series--Moz tool tips and tricks in under 2 minutes. To watch all of our videos so far, and to subscribe to future ones, make sure to visit the Daily SEO Fix channel on YouTube.
Moz Bar | | kellyjcoop1 -
How Can I intreptret The Crawl Report Resulst?
Hello, I am new to Moz and I have received 2 crawl reports. The first one was ok. I made a few changes to my site plugins, and my next crawl report came up with 41 4XX errors. Basically, a lot of my posts. I went back to my plugins and saw the following plugins: 404 redirect plugin & Utlimate Tiny MCE I reactivated both. I am presuming that these must have caused the issues or maybe my site was hacked. I re ran a crawl this morning, but I don't know what the different headings mean or how to understand the report. Can anyone advise? My site is new and just started to go up the rankings...so quite disappointed with this set back. regards Chriss
Moz Bar | | chrisspell0 -
Crawl Diagnostics - nofollow - reducing duplicate pages
Hi I'm looking at a crawl diagnostic report, I can see I have many duplicate pages, the reason for this is that when a brand filter is applied to a page. IE
Moz Bar | | chameleondm
www.mysite.com/mycategory - lets say this is the product listing page
www.mysite.com/category/mybrand - and this is the same page but with a brand filter applied
www.mysite.com/category/myotherbrand - and this is the same page but with a different brand filter applied I had intially appendeded the meta title, description and keywords with some extra content if a brand filter was applied, because the page on the whole does have different content. IE I would have a custom meta information, H1 tag and products on that page just for that specific brand.
However I am wondering if these two pages are really just competing with each other as lots of the content will be the same. Should I scrap that approach and use either nofollow on the brand filter link, or simply use a canonical. Thanks, James1