Duplicate Page Content and Title
-
Hi. New to Moz here. I really like all of the tools.
Moz recently sent me a Crawl Report and flagged every page as a duplicate content and duplicate title. The only reason/difference between the pages it flagged is the beginning of the URL. The crawl report shows the http://websitename.com and then http://www.websitename.com/
Is there something I'm missing about setting up my website? You can use either form to browse to my website, with the www and without. Why would Moz flag that as a duplicate?
Scott
-
Thanks so much, Ryan and Alex for the information. I can see I need to do some more research, so I appreciate the links and advice. We're using Yahoo Web Hosting and the Small Business Plan so, unfortunately as best I can tell, there's no support for 301 redirects. I didn't realize this was not a feature as our site is fairly small and I've never needed to redirect anything before. I've been thinking about moving the site for a long time and now I'm thinking I should step that up. I've had the preferred Domain name set up in Web Master Tools for years. I don't see anything else there that seems to help. Thanks again!
-
It's best to choose either www or non-www and stick with that single URL. When people link to you, you don't want some links going to www and others to non-www. Just use one and 301 redirect the other URL into the one you're going to use.
Also make the use of canonical tags. Ryan there sent over some links for that. It's best to set that up on all your pages as well.
-
P.S. The Moz.com developers recently wrote a blog post on duplication that really gets into the nitty gritty of why it's important to have pages that are canonical: https://moz.com/devblog/near-duplicate-detection/. A bit technical, but excellent stuff if you have that bent.
-
Hi Scott. I'm glad to hear you're finding the tools and community useful here. Here's the Google Support document regarding your site's current setup: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en. On it you'll find that Google states, "If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages." This means that you could be diluting the value of links from one version or the other and not seeing gains as quickly if people are splitting your links between the two.
You have a couple options. In Google Webmaster Tools you can set one version or the other as the preferred domain, but this isn't a universal feature across the net. It's better to use redirection to make one the default. Here's an older question along the same lines answered by the community to give you even more opinions: http://moz.com/community/q/benefit-to-301-redirect-domain-com-to-www-domain-com-or-vice-versa. And the Moz guide on using canonicalization: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization. These should point you in the right direction.
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
-
Why is my wp-uploads folder flagged as thin content?
SIte Crawl is flagging multiple entries from my wp-uploads directory as being 'thin content': these are dated folders that contain the images for the site blog, and as such don't have any text/html content at all. Should these directories be crawled at all? How would I go about correcting these warnings?
Getting Started | | lostmotionassembly0 -
Problem with duplicate titles
Hi there, after a site crawl Moz has reported that I have duplicated titles, however I don't understand why or how to fix it. Basically the urls are for the same collection or product and are identical except one has a -1 on the end of it or sometimes a %20. I cannot delete the url as they don't exist in my shopify store so cannot find them. The relevant page has the correct url when I check in shopify. Anyone have any ideas?
Getting Started | | cookie64980 -
Improve Page Authority or Domain Authority
I am very confused as to the practical implementation of these 2 terms PA and DA. I have a website and i want to rank a particular page. So to rank it at the top, should i have more backlinks of page** or **more backlinks of my Homepage. Does more back links of a particular page improves only PA or (PA & DA) both ?
Getting Started | | himanshu22630 -
A lot of duplicate content issues - does Moz understand canonical URL?
Hi, Since I subscribed to Moz my Magento store has given a lot of duplicate content issues. However, I did have a problem with Canonical URL at the time. It has been settled for a couple of weeks by now and although I had 302 redirects before, I configured Magento to 301 today. Since Moz has been crawling and showing duplicate content for exactly the same Magento pages but with endings like store=us, store=aus etc (since I have several store views enabled), I am wondering whether canonical URL does actually help Google to skip these versions of the duplicate pages and does Moz also understand it and will it reduce the amount of duplicate content errors once the 301 redirects and canonical URLs have been properly set for a week or so? Thanks!
Getting Started | | speedbird12290 -
Is it possible to connect a Facebook page that I manage?
I am creating a campaign and want to connect a page that I manage. However, I don't see how to do that. It clear how to connect my account but not the page.
Getting Started | | primoathletic0 -
Google + Business Page and Moz Pro
Is there a way to connect my Google + Business page with Moz? The only option I have available to connect when I press the button is my personal Google + Page. Thanks!
Getting Started | | BenhardtConstruction0 -
Page appearing multiple times in Warnings report
In reviewing my Moz warnings report, one page is appearing multiple times because the title is longer than recommended. Is this a bug in Moz? The page is appearing with a number of different URLs, despite there being a rel="canonical" tag. The page's canonical URL is: http://betablog.org/wishing-and-hoping-and-praying/ And in the warnings report I'm seeing variations like this: http://betablog.org/wishing-and-hoping-and-praying/?replytocom=26539 which are clearly links from the comments section.
Getting Started | | AlexBernardin0