Duplicate Content
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HI There,
Hoping someone can help me - before i damage my desk banging my head.
Getting notifications from ahrefs and Moz for duplicate content. I have no idea where these weird urls have came from , but they do take us to the correct page (but it seems a duplicate of this page).
correct url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/Antique-Vintage-Rings-c152.htm
Incorrect url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm
This is showing for most of our store categories
Desperate for help as to what could be causing these issues. I have a technical member of the ecommerce software go through the large sitemap files and they assured me it wasn't linked to the sitemap files.
Gemma
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Hi Gemma,
Strange! Typically, %20 is the symbol that content management systems use to convert spaces into allowable characters in URLs. Have you found any URLs that were written in the HTML with an accidental space?
That said, I know I'm a Moz associate and all, but Moz and Ahrefs are not nearly as good at understanding the web as Google; it's completely possible that these are errors that their crawlers are picking up, but Google isn't having a problem. Try searching for "site:[duplicate URL]" to see if Google is indexing this "duplicate content." I just checked with the example you provided, and it's not in Google's index.
If some other duplicate content URLs are in Google's index, then I'd use Google Analytics to determine where the traffic is coming from to these pages, in order to find where the URLs are written incorrectly.
Hope this helps!
Kristina
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It seems strange that the weird url i get takes me to the right page but it shows the sites homepage meta information !! I have no clue why this would occur
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Thanks for the suggestion. I will try and get to the cause of these urls and then if i cant get to the bottom of it i will look at adding 301's however it will mean adding a lot of them
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Hi,
Thanks for taking the time to assist.
I have checked the internal and external links to the url and there aren't any, also checked sitemap and these links aren't present there.
Regarding https, it was switched on at one point for a matter of minutes as it was done in error.
Regarding the link you state we had issues with these in the past which were generated from an external site which we had no control over.
Im hitting blanks as to locating how these are being generated.
Can you tell me what screaming frog can show me that Moz and ahrefs software doesn't? I haven't used it before.
Gemma
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In addition to what Bryan suggested, have you crawled your site using screaming frog or some other service.
Did you try going https: at some point??
Or... http://www.acsilver.co.uk/www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm
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It seems like something about either your search functions, or the e-commerce functionality, is causing these duplicate pages. Without having access to that information, I can tell you that the best option from my point of view would be to redirect all of the "incorrect" urls to the "correct" ones using 301s. I suggest taking a look at this page on Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools) if you're unfamiliar with how that works. No matter what platform your website uses, this should do you good.
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