Duplicate Page title - PHP Experts!
-
After running a crawl diagnostics i was surprised to see 336 duplicate page titles. But i am wondering if it is true or not. Most of them are not a page at all but a .php variation.
for example: The following are all the same page, but a different limit on viewing listings. Limiting your view to 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 as you choose.
.com/?lang=en&limit=5
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=10
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=15
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=25Same type of things are going on all over the site causing 228 duplicate content errors and the already mentioned 336 duplicate pages. But is "crawl diagnostic telling the truth" or is it just some php thing? I am not a php expert so any input would be much appreciated.
What should i do?
-
Both Ryan and Marie provided good answers, but let me elaborate further.
This is not a php thing. You can verify this yourself by visiting these pages.
Does the page content change when you visit /?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20 and switch to /?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20? If these look like the same page, then you have a duplicate content/title issue on your hands.
Google's take on the matter is simple...
"Provide one version of a URL to reach a document
To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this. You may also use canonical URL or use the rel="canonical" link element if you cannot redirect"
You have several options to deal with this, depending on the content_._
- Use the canonical tag to point the different versions of the page towards a single, definitive URL. Best to use this option only if the pages are actually duplicate.
- If the pages are not duplicate in content, but duplicate in title, then make sure your CMS writes unique title tags for every unique page of content, as Marie describes.
- If these extra pages are producing lists of only slightly varying entries, like a list of blog archives, you may consider adding a Meta Robots tag to NOINDEX, FOLLOW those superfluous pages.
- If dealing with pagination, here's an excellent article from Adam Audette to help.
This is a tricky area, and you must be careful when dealing with duplicate content, because it's easy to make a mistake and have Google de-index your content. That said, by correcting these errors, you just might see an improvement in your indexation and traffic stats.
-
I'm not sure if this will answer your question or just confuse things, but here's my take on the situation.
Are the pages all duplicate content, or are the titles just duplicated? If this is all the exact same page but simply with a different url then the solution is to use a rel canonical tag. (See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394). This tells Google what the original version of the page is and to not index the other pages.
However, if these are all different pages and you are trying to create a unique title for each then there are some ways to do this. Like Ryan mentioned, if you're using a CMS (i.e. Wordpress) there's likely a plugin that will do this for you. But, if you have a static site then here is what I do. I have a static site and I have a page called, let's say, www.example.com/information?id=123. I have thousands of these pages but they all have different content. The content is generated from a database.
So, what I do is I put php in the head of the page, before the title. The php reads the database and grabs some information about the page and stores that information in a variable called $title. Then, in the title tag I do this:
<title><?php echo $title; ?></title>
Hopefully that makes sense!
-
Let me preface by saying I am not a PHP expert. I do have some familiarity with PHP and the issue you mention.
The bottom line, you do not wish to use the same title for multiple URLs. Using the URLs you shared, some possible titles would be:
Best Restaurants in Miami
Best Restaurants in Miami - Page 3
Best Restaurants in Miami - Page 4
You need to adjust your site code to add a page number to the existing URLs. Most popular software is set up to do this automatically.
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
-
Duplicate page errors from pages don't even exist
Hi, I am having this issue within SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnosis report. There are a lot of crawl errors happening with pages don't even exist. My website has around 40-50 pages but SEO report shows that 375 pages have been crawled. My guess is that the errors have something to do with my recent htaccess configuration. I recently configured my htaccess to add trailing slash at the end of URLs. There is no internal linking issue such as infinite loop when navigating the website but the looping is reported in the SEOmoz's report. Here is an example of a reported link: http://www.mywebsite.com/Door/Doors/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/GlassNow-Services/GlassNow-Services/Glass-Compliance-Audit/ btw there is no issue such as crawl error in my Google webmaster tool. Any help appreciated
Technical SEO | | mmoezzi0 -
Are duplicate page titles fixed by the canonical tag
Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Splitting Page Authority with two URLs for the same page.
Hello guys, My website is currently holding two different URLs for the same page and I am under the impression such set up is dividing my Page Authority and Link Juice. We currently have the following page with both URLs below: www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/home.aspx
Technical SEO | | JoaoPdaCosta-WBR
www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/ Analysing the page authority and backlinks I identified that we are splitting the amount of backlinks (links from sites, social media and therefore authority). "/home.aspx"
PA: 67
Linking Root Domains: 52
Total Links: 272 "/"
PA: 64
Linking Root Domains: 29
Total Links: 128 I am under the impression that if the URLs were the same we would maximise our backlinks and therefore page authority. My Question: How can I fix this? Should I have a 301 redirect from the page "/" to the "/home.aspx" therefore passing the authority and link juice of “/” directly to “/homes.aspx”? Trying to gather thoughts and ideas on this, suggestions are much appreciated? Thanks!0 -
How can we fix duplicate title tags like these being reported in GWT?
Hi all, I posted this in the GWT Forum on Monday and still no answers so I will try here. Our URL is http://www.ccisolutions.com
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
We have over 200 pages on our site being flagged by GWT as having
duplicate title tags. The majority of them look similar to this: Title: <a>JBL EON MusicMix 16 | Mixer | CCI Solutions</a> GWT is reporting these URLs to have all the same title: /StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Category/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Footer/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Header/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?origin=../StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?origin=GoogleBase These are all the same page. There was a time when we used these origin codes, but we stopped using them over a year ago. We also added canonical tags to every page to prevent us from having duplicate content issues. However, these origin codes are
still showing up in GWT. Is there anything we can do to fix this problem. Do we have a technical issue with our site code and the way Google is seeing our dynamic URLs? Any suggestions on how we can fix this problem? The same is true in our report for Meta descriptions. Thanks
you,
Dana Tan0 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Use target keyword on several page titles or homepage only?
If I want my homepage to rank for a keyword (ie "red widgets"), does it support or dilute the homepage's rank if I use the keyword on other pages? I can see it working either way: The search engine looks at your site, sees that the target keyword is used throughout the site, and ranks the site higher as a result. Using the keyword on several pages makes it so none of them stand out, and ultimately it's harder to rank highly. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Kyle_M0 -
Video thumbnail pages with "sort" feature -- tons of duplicate content?
A client has 2 separate pages for video thumbnails. One page is "popular videos" with a sort function for over 700 pages of video thumbnails with 10 thumbnails and short desriptions per page. (/videos?sort_by=popularity). The second page is "latest videos" (/videos?sort_by=latest) with over 7,000 pages. Both pages have a sort function -- including latest, relevance, popularity, time uploaded, etc. Many of the same video thumbnails appear on both pages. Also, when you click a thumbnail you get a full video page and these pages appear to get indexed well. There seem to be duplicate content issues between the "popular" and "latest" pages, as well as within the sort results on each of those pages. (A unique URL is generated everytime you use the sort function i.e. /videos?sort_by=latest&uploaded=this_week). Before my head explodes, what is the best way to treat this? I was thinking a noindex,follow meta robot on every page of thumbnails since the individual video pages are well indexed, but that seems extreme. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Htm vs. aspx page extensions & duplicate content
We have a client whose site is fairly new. There isn't much in the way of SEO results so far. In their content management system they have implemented friendly URLs and changed the extensions from aspx to htm. Now the htm pages are all indexed in Google but when I run a campaign report in SEOmoz it shows that all pages are duplicated with there being both htm and aspx pages for each page. Should we do 301 redirects from the aspx pages to the htm pages? Or would we be safe by removing the htm pages and letting Google reindex the site with the aspx page extensions? Does Google have any kind of preference as to what the page extensions are as long as the URLs include keywords?
Technical SEO | | IvieDigital0