Duplicate title tags due to lightbox use
-
I am looking at a site and am pulling up duplicate title tags because of their lightbox use so...
So they have a page: http://www.website.com/page
and then a duplicate of that page: http://www.website.com/page?width=500&height=600
on a huge number of pages (using Drupal)...
that kind of thing - what would be the best / cleanest solution?
-
Hi there,
IMO the two pages are near duplicates and I have seen pages that have been indexed in such cases (on one of our own projects). Then we have taken in consideration the canonical, and issue was solved. This is why I have recommended it, but I am opened to other solutions also.
Gr., Keszi
-
Keszi is that really necessary? As a programmer I find it difficult to believe that Google would require such a ridiculous thing. Any url can have a query string appended and then a link built to that query url+query string. Query strings simply add a ? then a key=value pair to the url. If this were necessary I could go to my competitors website and just add a query string and build a bunch of backlinks to it. Google would then consider all their website duplicate content because the website root exists and a website root version with a query string on the same page.
What I am getting at is that query strings don't require such action. Something on the client side would never require server side action by any third party (google or otherwise). It would basically be to easily manipulated.
However, there are times that the website uses valid query strings to sort/filter or even deliver content (like modern CMS joomla, drupal, wordpress). When you query a database with a query string normally there is significant code that handles the URL and makes it a url in it's own right. You don't see ?p=23. You see a url friendly version.
If your website has query strings that sort/filter and the site is not sophisticated enough to manipulate those query strings with .htaccess to deliver SEO friendly urls I would suggest reading/utilizing this google page/tool.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080548?hl=en
This explains this EXACT issue. When websites expose query strings that enable the site to sort/filter.
-
Hi Luke,
I would implement a canonical in any situation where there can be parameters in the url. This way telling any search engine to only consider one (the original) version of that page.
Gr., Keszi
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
-
Is it good practice to use "SAVE $1000's" in SEO titles and Meta Descriptions?
Our company sells a product system that will permanently waterproof almost anything. We market it as a DIY system. I am working on SEO titles and descriptions. This topic came up for discussion, if using "SAVE $1000's.." would help or hurt. We are trying to create an effective call to action, but we are wondering if search engines see it as click bait. Can you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tyler.louth0 -
Using standard title and description tags with rich snippets are there potential conflicts
Recently I've employing rich snippets using the guides from schema.org I find them a great way to let the search engines understand the content of my web pages, also author and publisher tags are all thrown into the migreat great love it. My question however is what to do with the existing title and description tags? Should they be left in? Do they cause conflicts with the search engines? Should I just ignore this gut feeling and leave them in. Any insights into the use of schema and a standard tags appreciated. Best David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Duplicated Pages and Forums
Does duplicate content hurt that particular duplicated content, or the entire site? There are some parts of my site that I don’t care about getting high rankings on search engines. For example, I have a forum and there are certain links that only logged in people can see. If you aren’t logged in, they will take you to a page where it tells u to log in. google, obviously not logged in, interprets this as lots and lots of the same duplicated page. Should I just leave it alone cause I dont care if those pages makes it to search engines. Will it not hurt the entire site? For example, can my homepage search rankings decrase? That leads to my next question. What is the best way to optimize a forum? Whenever someone posts a new post, it seems another url for the same forum thread is created..... which is obviously duplicated….in other words, if like 20 people post on a thread, i believe my site adds 20 urls for that page...anyone know how to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Duplicate Content
http://www.pensacolarealestate.com/JAABA/jsp/HomeAdvice/answers.jsp?TopicId=Buy&SubtopicId=Affordability&Subtopicname=What%20You%20Can%20Afford http://www.pensacolarealestate.com/content/answers.html?Topic=Buy&Subtopic=Affordability I have no idea how the first address exists at all... I ran the SEOMOZ tool and I got 600'ish DUPLICATE CONTENT errors! I have errors on content/titles etc... How do I get rid of all the content being generated from this JAABA/JSP "jibberish"? Please ask questions that will help you help me. I have always been 1st on google local and I have a business that is starting to hurt very seriously from being number three 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
Duplicate Page Title problems with Product Catalogues (Categories, Subcategories etc.)
Hey guys, I've done a fair bit of Googling and "mozzing" and can't seem to find a definitive solution. In our product catalogue on our site we have multiple ways to access the product for navigation purposes, and SeoMoz is throwing up hundreds of duplicate page title errors which are basically just different ways to get to the same product yet it sees it as a "separate page" and thus duplicating itself. Is this just SeoMoz confusing itself or does Google actually see it this way too? For example, a product might be: www.example.com/region/category/subcategory/ www.example.com/region2/category/subcategory/ www.example.com/region/category/subcategory2/ etc. Is the only solution to have the product ONLY listed in one combination? This kind of kills our ability to have easy refinement for customers browsing the catalogue, i.e: something that falls under the "Gifts for Men" might also be a match for "Father's Day Gifts" or "Gifts for Dad" etc. Any solution or advice is greatly appreciated, cheers 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Title tag solution for a med sized site
Its the same old story, we all know it well. I have a client that has a site with 20k+ pages (not too big) and traffic levels around 450k/month. Now we have identified 15 pages with various conversion points/great backlink metrics etc. that we are going to explicitly target in the first round of recs. However, we are looking at about 18,000 dup title tags that I'd like to clean up. The site is not on a CMS and in the past I've had the dev team write a script to adopt the h1 tag or the name of the page etc as the title tag. This can cause a problem when some of these pages that are being found in long tail search lose their positions etc. I'm more hesitant than ever to make this move with this current client because they get a ton of long tail traffic spread over a ton of original content they wrote. How does everyone else usually handle this? Thoughts? Thanks in advance Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeCoughlin0