What is Considered Duplicate Content by Crawlers?
-
I am asking this because I have a couple of site audit tools that I use to crawl a site I work on every week and they are showing duplicate content issues (which I know there is a lot on this site) but some of what is flagged as duplicate content makes no sense.
For example, the following URL's were grouped together as duplicate content:
|
https://www.firefold.com/contact-us
|
| https://www.firefold.com/sale |
|
|
How are these pages duplicate content? I am confused on what site audit tools are considering duplicate content.
Just FYI, this is data from Moz crawl diagnostics but SEMrush site auditor is giving me the same type of data.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Ryan
-
Yea I just started working on this site. I haven't used Moz Analytics much so just wanting to see how their crawler crawls pages.
And yes I agree, there are a lot of BIG BIG BIG issues with this site.
I got a large workload over the next few months haha.
-
I would add that there's is no text on any of those three pages - any "text" one would see there is actually just embedded in an image - which is a huge issue for a number of reasons:
- Search engines see that there's no text - a big no-no.
- You're getting practically no SEO value from the content that would be there, even if there isn't much.
- It's heavier this way - which makes load times slower.
I want to clarify that there are many, bigger issues with these pages - but as your question concerns only duplicate content, I'll leave all of that out for the time being. To summarize, Google, Yahoo, and Bing are just seeing some duplicate banners, sidebars, etc. and then some images in the body of your pages. Hence, duplicate content.
-
Thanks for that information.
It makes sense looking at the data and pages from that perspective.
-
Hi Ryan!
Our crawler will flag pages that have at least 90% similarity in the entire source code of the site so not just the body.
The way you want to interpret the report is the contact-us page has 35 duplicates, so "gabe" and "sale" are not dupes of each other in this section but are only each a duplicate of "contact-us". Those URLs might appear with their own duplicates of the same pages further down in the report.
While on the front end the pages do not appear to be similar. The issue is likely with the amount of javascript code on those pages.
Our crawler cannot read javascript so we are likely only able to see the template of the page. Other search tools are probably seeing the same thing as it returns 79% similarity using this tool: http://www.freebulkseotools.com/similar-page-checker-tool.php
I can't provide much insight from a dev perspective but hope this 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
-
Content suggestions
Hello, I am looking at the content suggestions in the page optimisation section and was wondering why the system says that some pages cover some topics and some don't cover it ? Is it based on finding "noun phrases" that co-occurre (twice the same one) ? or "noun phrases" that are used in the same context (even though they are different) ? Thank you,
Moz Bar | | seoanalytics0 -
MozBot Finding Duplicate Pages That Aren't Duplicate
I've been reviewing the technical audits for my campaign in Moz, and noticed I had a number of duplicate content issues that I'm not really sure how to address. When I click on the links of what the duplicates are, they are all different links that have different content/images. Based on what I was seeing other's wrote in the forum, this could be because the code base is really the same between these pages, and many of these were using query parameters (I'm assuming that is why the code is almost exactly the same across these pages), so example: website.com/tags/KEYWORD1?type=KEYWORD2 is a duplicate of website.com/tags/KEYWORD3?type=KEYWORD4 I was reading that I can use that URL Parameters area in google search console, but my search console says that the googlebot isn't experiencing issues, so I wasn't sure if that was the right move. I can't do the canonicals because these pages all have different content on them, and I know duplicate content is a big SEO issue, so I really wasn't sure what my next steps should be. Thanks for the help!
Moz Bar | | amaray4030 -
Alternative to Moz Content?
Hi, Looks like moz content is really gone 😞 Does anyone have an alternative that does sort of the same thing?
Moz Bar | | mikeymosh1 -
How can I find duplicate pages from a Moz Crawl?
We have many duplicate pages that show up on the Moz Crawl, and we're trying to fix these but it's very difficult because I can't see a way to isolate the code where the duplicate is found. For instance, http://experiencemission.org/immersion/ is one of our main pages, and the crawl shows one duplicate of http://experiencemission.org/immersion. It appears that one of our staff manually edited the source code in one of our pages but forgot the trailing slash. This would be an easy fix but the problem is that this page is linked to internally on our website 2423 times, so it's next to impossible to find the code that is incorrect. We have many other pages with this same basic problem. We know we have duplicates, but it's next to impossible to isolate them. So my question is this: When viewing the Moz Crawl data is there any way to see where a specific duplicate page link is located on our website? Thanks for any and all help!
Moz Bar | | expmission0 -
Duplicate Home Page in Moz Report
I recently ran a crawl report in MOZ for www.laddersfree.co.uk and it has picked duplicate pages for my home page. The two pages are www.laddersfree.co.uk and www.laddersfree.co.uk The CMS System my developer is using is Concrete5. If you look at the source code there is a Canonical <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.laddersfree.co.uk/" /> I am very confused as to why there are two pages picked up in the crawl. Can someone offer any advice please? Thank you. Jason
Moz Bar | | gymmad0 -
Weekly Custom Reports Send Duplicates
For one of my sites, I have set up a weekly custom report to be sent out, but when the report comes in, there are multiple copies of the report. Any help would be appreciated on how to make sure that only one copy of the report is sent.
Moz Bar | | Wharthog0 -
Duplicate Content Issues
How we can find duplicate content of our website? And how we can resolve duplicate content issue? If you have any tool for this then Please suggest me.
Moz Bar | | surabhi60 -
Duplicate page titles
Hi -- A crawl tells me I have 200 duplicate page titles. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell me what those pages are duplicating. What do I do with this information? How do I begin to respond? Thanks
Moz Bar | | skipperdoodle0