Why aren't canonical tags reducing duplicate page title/content?
-
We have canonical tags set up for a feature page on one of our sites. This site has an image gallery controlled by javascript. To aid the user experience the image can also be specified by a URL parameter (the javascript also uses this URL to fetch the images). The SEOMoz report complains that the links to these images have duplicate page titles and content.
To try and combat this we set canonical tags to point only to the original page, without the slideshow parameter. e.g.
http://www.example.com/feature-page/
http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=1 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/
http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=2 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/
The latest SEOMoz report has come back and the errors still exist.
What can we do to remove these error messages?
Thanks
-
Hi Mark,
I have evaluated the crawl report. The canonical tag for your images is properly set. There are numerous issues the crawl report presents related to your site.
1. Your home page is duplicated. The URL with and without a trailing slash both are accessible.
2. Many pages are missing canonical tags.
3. You have a 302 redirect from your /how-to-find-us page to the same page with a trailing slash.
4. Most of your pages end without any tech extension, but some end in .html. I would suggest being consistent throughout your site.
5. You have some long title tags and pages with missing meta descriptions.
More specific to the images which are causing the issue, the system you have in place is a bit odd. Most sites which present various images for the same page have a means to do such without each image generating a new url for the same page. I would suggest investigating a different image viewer.
Good luck.
| |
| |
| |
-
I have submitted a new crawl report request for the updated URL.
-
Ryan,
Forgive me, I gave you the wrong URL. the original question related to www.earlscroftfarm.co.uk and not the doorway site.
Thank you for your time.
Mark
-
I have submitted the site for a SEOmoz crawl report so I can view the issue. The crawl should be completed within a day. I'll share the findings with you upon receipt of the report.
While looking at your site I noticed it is very clearly a doorway site. A search engine would likely determine the sole purpose of this site is to redirect traffic to earlscroftfarm.co.uk. It is highly likely Google has devalued all of the site's links.
Why? The sites are clearly operated by the same company, they are hosted on the same server, and the links are about as blatantly obvious as possible.The IPs of each site are different which could be interpreted as you intentionally trying to set up a deceptive link network.
The idea behind links to another sites being used to increase PR stems from the idea the links are earned from independent sources. Linking to your own site does not contribute to that valuation. If you feel this content is helpful, I would recommend merging it into your main site.
-
Thank you. Here's the site link. Self Catering Boston
-
Thanks, we'll wait for the next crawl.
I made the changes on Friday and the scan is dated as Sunday so I'll let it try again before I report a problem.
Thanks for your help.
-
Hi Mark,
If you added the canonical tags very recently, say the last 7-10 days, it's possible the latest crawl started before those tags were in place. (the dates in the Web App are usually the date the crawl finished processing the data, so it can be a bit confusing to follow)
As Ryan said, sounds like you did the right things setting the canonicals. If the problem persists after your next crawl, please contact the help team.
-
Hi Mark,
It sounds like you have taken the correct steps. The most likely answer to your problem is either the canonical tag was not properly written or there are some pages which are missing the tag.
A less likely possibility is a problem with the crawl tool. In that case you can reach out to help@seomoz.org for assistance.
Can you share your site URL so we can take a better look?
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
-
Large site with content silo's - best practice for deep indexing silo content
Thanks in advance for any advice/links/discussion. This honestly might be a scenario where we need to do some A/B testing. We have a massive (5 Million) content silo that is the basis for our long tail search strategy. Organic search traffic hits our individual "product" pages and we've divided our silo with a parent category & then secondarily with a field (so we can cross link to other content silo's using the same parent/field categorizations). We don't anticipate, nor expect to have top level category pages receive organic traffic - most people are searching for the individual/specific product (long tail). We're not trying to rank or get traffic for searches of all products in "category X" and others are competing and spending a lot in that area (head). The intent/purpose of the site structure/taxonomy is to more easily enable bots/crawlers to get deeper into our content silos. We've built the page for humans, but included link structure/taxonomy to assist crawlers. So here's my question on best practices. How to handle categories with 1,000+ pages/pagination. With our most popular product categories, there might be 100,000's products in one category. My top level hub page for a category looks like www.mysite/categoryA and the page build is showing 50 products and then pagination from 1-1000+. Currently we're using rel=next for pagination and for pages like www.mysite/categoryA?page=6 we make it reference itself as canonical (not the first/top page www.mysite/categoryA). Our goal is deep crawl/indexation of our silo. I use ScreamingFrog and SEOMoz campaign crawl to sample (site takes a week+ to fully crawl) and with each of these tools it "looks" like crawlers have gotten a bit "bogged down" with large categories with tons of pagination. For example rather than crawl multiple categories or fields to get to multiple product pages, some bots will hit all 1,000 (rel=next) pages of a single category. I don't want to waste crawl budget going through 1,000 pages of a single category, versus discovering/crawling more categories. I can't seem to find a consensus as to how to approach the issue. I can't have a page that lists "all" - there's just too much, so we're going to need pagination. I'm not worried about category pagination pages cannibalizing traffic as I don't expect any (should I make pages 2-1,000) noindex and canonically reference the main/first page in the category?). Should I worry about crawlers going deep in pagination among 1 category versus getting to more top level categories? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | DrewProZ1 -
F rated page appearing higher than A rated page
Hi, We have a page that we have optimised in the MOZ system and got a grade A for the term "Dental Implants Wolverhampton" The page that has been optimised isn't being indexed in google http://www.perfectdental.eu.com/treatments-implants.php However, this page http://www.perfectdental.eu.com/uk-clinics-dental-team.php Which hasn't been optimised is indexed 11. If i run this page through the MOZ "on-page checker" it receives a quality score of F. Its very confusing, would be great to hear from anyone with any ideas? Thanks
Moz Pro | | popcreativeltd
Ade0 -
Duplicate Page Titles & Content
We have just launched a new version of a website and after running it through SEOMOZ we have over 6000 duplicate title & content errors. (awesome) 😕 We have products that show up multiple times under different URLs however we "thought" we had implemented the rel=canonical correctly. My question is - do these errors still show up in SEOMOZ despite the canonical tags being there OR if they were "correct" would we be getting "zero" errors?
Moz Pro | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
I know our business listed in Yahoo and medranks.com (for example). But my open site explorer report doesn't show those. however on their sites, I see the listing. Why is this?
I know our business listed in Yahoo and medranks.com (for example). But my open site explorer report doesn't show those links on the inbound report. however on their respective sites, I see the listing when I search for us. And the link does work..... Why is this? Why don't I see it on the open site report?
Moz Pro | | cschwartzel0 -
Why can't I change the domain being tracked in my campaign?
Apologies if this has already been answered a million times and/or if I'm posting this in the wrong place... I did look, but couldn't find the answer anywhere... I just realized that all this time I have been tracking www.mydomain.com in my campaign for a long time now, while I should probably have been tracking *.mydomain.com. I wanted to change this, but it looks like I can't. If I have to set up a whole new campaign, with all of the same keywords, competitive sites to track, etc., that will take forever. Why can't I just change it so that my campaign starts tracking *.mydomain.com instead of www.mydomain.com from now on? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | ScottShrum0 -
How can I reduce the number of links on a page and keep the site easy to navigate?
The SEOmoz Site Crawl indicates that we have too many on page links on over 9,970 pages. This is an ecommerce site with a large number of categories. I have a couple of questions regarding this issue: How important is the "too many on page links" factor to SEO? What are some methods of reducing the number of links when there are a large number of categories? We have main categories with dropdown menus currently and have found that they are used to browse and shop the store.
Moz Pro | | afmaury1 -
Crawl Diagnostics and missing meta tags on noindex blog pages
Hi Guys/Gals We do love the Crawl Diagnostics, but do find the missing meta tags ("Missing Meta Description" Tag in this case) somewhat spammy. We use the "All in One SEO Pack" for our blog and it does stick in noindex,follow (as it should) on the pages that is of no use to us. "2008/04/page/2/" and the likes. Maybe I'm wrong but should the Diagnostics tool not respect the noindex tag and just ignore any warnings, since it should really mean that these pages are NOT included in the search index. Meaning that the other meta tags are really useless. Any thoughts?
Moz Pro | | sfseo0 -
Multiple Page Title Elements?
Greetings, I am baffled by the recommendation I repeatedly receive from seomoz's on-page optimization tool. The web page I am working on only shows one title between <title>and</title> in it's head. However, seomoz is also reading "Pass to multiple" from somewhere. It recommends that I "Avoid Multiple Page Title Elements" and I would like to but cannot find them. Any suggestions? By the way, I inherited this site and am just trying to deconstruct someone else's work. As a novice, I realize there might be some obvious explanation that I am just missing. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | shedontdiet0
