Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors
-
Hi,
I'm new to SeoMoz and to this forum. I've started a new campaign on my site and got back loads of error.
Most of them are Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors. I know I have some duplicate titles but I don't have any duplicate content.
I'm not a web developer and not so expert but I have the impression that the crawler is following all my internal links (Infact I have also plenty of warnings saying "Too many on-page links".
Do you think this is the cause of my errors? Should I implement the nofollow on all internal links? I'm working with Joomla.
Thanks a lot for your help
Marco
-
Hi Marco,
I took a look at your page at http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/linea-costiera/isole-tremiti.html
Looks like you've got the canonical in place okay here. The next step is to add the canonical on every page that is a duplicate of this page. And you want to make sure to point to the right page. Let me be clear: Every page that is a duplicate of this page should have the same canonical. In this case:
<link rel=”canonical” href=[”http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/gargano/isole-tremiti.html”/](view-source:http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/linea-costiera/%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/gargano/isole-tremiti.html%E2%80%9D/)>
You can find the other pages you need to add this tag to in your SEOmoz report. In each duplicated content report, it will list the number of other pages that are duplicates. Simply click on the number to see the URLs.
I'm not a Joomla expert, but webmasters I've talked to have expressed that other platforms such as Wordpress and Drupal are much more accommodating of these types of fixes. There are some various plugin modules you can use, but you'll have to select one appropriate to your configuration.
Here's a good resource from Dr. Pete: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
Hope this helps. Best of luck.
-
Elias,
I too have 'thousands' of duplicated errors in SEOmoz. Most of which are because it is returning
/abc.com as a different page to /ABC.com
Surely Google doesn't do that? Just because one URL is in capital and the other small case? I also have no idea where SEOmoz is picking that up from......possibly links internal to the page with the hyperlink using different case?
It seems to me this is too sensitive and for me to fix that would take WEEKS!!!! I fail to see if there would be any uplift if Google sees beyond that issue as its cosmetic and not functional.
Regards
Andy
-
It looks fine to me. You will need to do the same on all of your pages.
If you've just added the code you will need to wait up to a week for SEOmoz to re-crawl your website depending on when you're site crawl is scheduled.
Let me know how you get on.
Elias
-
Hi Elias, Hi Marisa,
thanks you both
you are right, in the meantime I had done this but I have the impression it is not working and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
I'm attaching a link to a page of my site (I hope I can do this). Please have a look at the code, you will see the tag rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/gargano/isole-tremiti.html”/> which is indicating the URL I want to use. However SeoMoz is still giving me the error. And this is happening for both the Italian and English version.
So far I've only added the tag to this page, I want to find the solution before modifying all pages currently affected.
http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/linea-costiera/isole-tremiti.html
Thanks a lot again
-
Hi Marco, as Marissa says - by putting the canonical tag on one page you are putting it on all of them as they are in fact the same page - they are just reached by different URLs.
-
www.site.com/ and www.site.com/index.html, site.com/index.html/, ect, are already the same page. So, there's only one page TO put the tag on. You're just telling the crawlers that you only want one of them to get the credit, and which version of the page you prefer to be displayed.
-
Hi Elias,
thanks a lot for your reply. I've read few posts about the canonical tag and Yes I'm going to try it.
Just couple of things:
-
Let's say I have 4 duplicate for one page, I presume I have to add the tag in the head of only one page right? Does it make any difference which one I pick?
-
Any idea on how this can be implemented in Joomla?It doesn't seem to be very straightforward.
Thanks a lot
Marco
-
-
Hi Marco,
It seems to me like you need to implement the canonical tag.
Site crawlers/bots will consider the following pages as different pages because of their URL and thus tell indicate to them that the content is duplicated on each page...
By implementing the following tag on each of your sites pages (changing the URL for each page) you will tell the crawler which page they should be indexing and to ignore the other.
Here's an example of a canonical tag (to be placed within the head tag of the page)
I think this will sort out your duplication issues.
You can find more information about canonical URLs here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
I hope this helps!
Elias
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
-
Near Duplicate Title Tag Checker
Hi Everyone, I know there are a lot of tools like Siteliner, which can check the uniqueness of body copy, but are there any that can restrict the check to the title tags alone? Alternatively, is there an Excel or Google Sheets function that would allow me to do the same thing? Thanks, Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyRSB0 -
Increase in duplicate page titles due to canonical tag issue
Implemented canonical tag (months back) in product pages to avoid duplicate content issue. But Google picks up the URL variations and increases duplicate page title errors in Search Console. Original URL: www.example.com/first-product-name-123456 Canonical tag: Variation 1: www.example.com/first-product--name-123456 Canonical tag: Variation 2: www.example.com/first-product-name-sync-123456 Canonical tag: Kindly advice the right solution to fix the issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDdigital0 -
Search console, duplicate content and Moz
Hi, Working on a site that has duplicate content in the following manner: http://domain.com/content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulneuteboom
http://www.domain.com/content Question: would telling search console to treat one of them as the primary site also stop Moz from seeing this as duplicate content? Thanks in advance, Best, Paul. http0 -
Duplicate Content... Really?
Hi all, My site is www.actronics.eu Moz reports virtually every product page as duplicate content, flagged as HIGH PRIORITY!. I know why. Moz classes a page as duplicate if >95% content/code similar. There's very little I can do about this as although our products are different, the content is very similar, albeit a few part numbers and vehicle make/model. Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowoody
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/audi-a4-8d-b5-1994-2000-abs-ecu-en/bosch-5-3
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/bmw-3-series-e36-1990-1998-abs-ecu-en/ate-34-51 Now, multiply this by ~2,000 products X 7 different languages and you'll see we have a big dupe content issue (according to Moz's Crawl Diagnostics report). I say "according to Moz..." as I do not know if this is actually an issue for Google? 90% of our products pages rank, albeit some much better than others? So what is the solution? We're not trying to deceive Google in any way so it would seem unfair to be hit with a dupe content penalty, this is a legit dilemma where our product differ by as little as a part number. One ugly solution would be to remove header / sidebar / footer on our product pages as I've demonstrated here - http://woodberry.me.uk/test-page2-minimal-v2.html since this removes A LOT of page bloat (code) and would bring the page difference down to 80% duplicate.
(This is the tool I'm using for checking http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php) Other "prettier" solutions would greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks,
Woody 🙂1 -
How to Fix Duplicate Page Content?
Our latest SEOmoz crawl reports 1138 instances of "duplicate page content." I have long been aware that our duplicate page content is likely a major reason Google has de-valued our Web store. Our duplicate page content is the result of the following: 1. We sell audio books and use the publisher's description (narrative) of the title. Google is likely recognizing the publisher as the owner / author of the description and our description as duplicate content. 2. Many audio book titles are published in more than one format (abridged, unabridged CD, and/or unabridged MP3) by the same publisher so the basic description on our site would be the same at our Web store for each format = more duplicate content at our Web store. Here's are two examples (one abridged, one unabridged) of one title at our Web store. Kill Shot - abridged Kill Shot - unabridged How much would the body content of one of the above pages have to change so that a SEOmoz crawl does NOT say the content is duplicate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
Duplicate content
I run about 10 sites and most of them seemed to fall foul of the penguin update and even though I have never sought inorganic links I have been frantically searching for a link based answer since April. However since asking a question here I have been pointed in another direction by one of your contributors. It seems At least 6 of my sites have duplicate content issues. If you search Google for "We have selected nearly 200 pictures of short haircuts and hair styles in 16 galleries" which is the first bit of text from the site short-hairstyles.com about 30000 results appear. I don't know where they're from nor why anyone would want to do this. I presume its automated since there is so much of it. I have decided to redo the content. So I guess (hope) at some point in the future the duplicate nature will be flushed from Google's index? But how do I prevent it happening again? It's impractical to redo the content every month or so. For example if you search for "This facility is written in Flash® to use it you need to have Flash® installed." from another of my sites that I coincidently uploaded a new page to a couple of days ago, only the duplicate content shows up not my original site. So whoever is doing this is finding new stuff on my site and getting it indexed on google before even google sees it on my site! Thanks, Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
Duplicate Content - Panda Question
Question: Will duplicate informational content at the bottom of indexed pages violate the panda update? **Total Page Ratio: ** 1/50 of total pages will have duplicate content at the bottom off the page. For example...on 20 pages in 50 different instances there would be common information on the bottom of a page. (On a total of 1000 pages). Basically I just wanted to add informational data to help clients get a broader perspective on making a decision regarding "specific and unique" information that will be at the top of the page. Content ratio per page? : What percentage of duplicate content is allowed per page before you are dinged or penalized. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Canonical Not Fixing Duplicate Content
I added a canonical tag to the home page last month, but I am still showing duplicate content for the home page. Here is the tag I added: What am I missing? Duplicate-Content.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InnoInsulation0