Duplicate titles Question
-
Hi eveyone,
I have around 1000 duplicate titles and meta description. The poblem was that I had pages in my home page and different pages had the same title.
For example,
index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/
/index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N12//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1444//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1448//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1448/P6//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1452/I have 172 of the same page!So I took off all the pagination on my home page and just added 'click fo more'. When they click more, it takes them to the category.So my question is will google slowly start deleting or non-indexing these duplicate titles or pages as I have removed it from my website? (Just so that you know I added a canonical link and figuring out how to add page numbers to met titles and meta description tags for categories with pages)
-
I'm not entirely clear what the nature of the non-paginated pages is, but the canonical tag is probably a decent solution here. You may actually want to leave the crawl paths to those URLs open for a bit - Google won't process the canonicals unless they crawl the URLs. See my recent post on that subject:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/logic-meet-google-crawling-to-deindex
Pagination is a bit tougher. You've got a few options:
(1) META NOINDEX pages 2+ (tends to be pretty effective, but depends on the nature of the pages)
(2) Use Rel=prev and Rel=next. This is tough to implement, but is recommended by Google. If the pagination isn't massive-scale, it works reasonably well.
(3) If the pagination is controlled by URL parameters, indicate them in Google Webmaster Tools. I've had mixed luck with this, and your examples wouldn't work ("/P6" isn't going to come up as a traditional URL variable).
-
In my category page, I have the links of the article and short summary of it. For example, check this page: http://www.exercisebiology.com/index.php/site/training/
So if I get you right, I shouldn't use the canonical for home page and categories since the content changes as I post new articles, right?
-
Do not use the canonical tag unless the pages are 100% duplicates.
If you are talking about duplicate content from your blog posts showing up on category pages, perhaps you can edit your blog settings to only show snippets of each post instead of the entire thing.
-
Thank you much Anthony.
I have pages on home page and category that obviously needs pages so that every arrticle don't show up in one long page. How do deal with those?
1) Just keep them the same and add a rel=canonical to it? Or since they have different content on each page ( or different article titles), just leave out the rel=canonical?
-
Yes. Google will stop indexing most of the duplicate pages since you added the canonical tag.
Figure out why there are so many duplicate pages and try to eliminate that problem. I'm guessing your comment about 'click more, it takes them to the category page' addressed this issue. It's best to stop a problem before it starts.
These pages may fall slowly out of Google's index. They will likely leave Webmaster Tools at an even slower rate. If this doesn't seem to work out for you, another option would be to 301 every page ending with growth/N* back to the canonical version.
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
-
Canonical Expert question!
Hello, I am looking for some help here with an estate agent property web site. I recently finished the MoZ crawling report and noticed that MoZ sees some pages as duplicate, mainly from pages which list properties as page 1,2,3 etc. Here is an example: http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=2
Technical SEO | | artdivision
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=3 etc etc Now I know that the best practise says I should set a canonical url to this page:
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=all but here is where my problem is. http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 contains good written content (around 750 words) before the listed properties are displayed while the "page=all" page do not have that content, only the properties listed. Also http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 is similar with the originally designed landing page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses I would like yoru advise as to what is the best way to can url this and sort the problem. My original thoughts were to can=url to this page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses instead of the "page=all" version but your opinion will be highly appreciated.0 -
Duplicate Titles and Sitemap rel=alternate
Hello, Does anyone know why I still have duplicate titles after crawling with moz (also google webmasters shows the same) even after I implemented (since 1 week or 2) a new sitemap with rel=alternate attribute for languges? In fact, the duplicates should be in the titles like http://socialengagement.it/su-di-me and http://socialengagement.it/en/su-di-me. The sitemap is on socialengagement.it/sitemap.xml (please note formatting somehow does not show correctly, you should see the source code to double check if its done properly. Was made by hand by me). Thanks for help! Eugenio
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Maximum <title>length - use full or shorten?</title>
I have a Title on a page that has more than 70 chars in it, and I also have to include the page type and brand in the title. page type: Type page header: This is the page title of the long title and I need to add more content brand: Brand Is it better to concanenate the title server-side and use a .. instead, like this? Type: This is the page title of the long title and I need to.. | Brand Or, should I put the full Title of the page so that the keywords are available for Google? example, Type: This is the page title of the long title and I need to add more content | Brand I'm trying to keep to the 70 char limit for Google. Which solution is the more ideal situation? Thanks all jonathan
Technical SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Duplicate title tags and meta description tags
According to GWT, it seems that some of the pages on my website have duplicate title and meta tags. The pages identified by Google are nothing but dynamic pages: http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=1
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=2 The thing is that I do use the canonical link tag on all pages. Should I also use the "robots noindex" tag when the page is invoked using a GET parameter? Again sorry for my english. Thank you, Stephane1 -
Ask a Question
Using SEOmoz for the first time, the initial crawl said we have 9,00 errors which were basically 4,500 duplicate pages and 4,500 dupllicate page titles. (ie http://domainname/etc .html, and http://www.domainmname/etc .html
Technical SEO | | FFTCOUK
We altered our website accordingly by changing all internal links to http://www.domainmname/etc .html as Google and all other rngines are listing us using the www. prefix. On the next crawl we now have even more of these duplicate errors. How d we go about removing them as we only have one file for each on the server. Google has down graded our website in April by 35% and ass this is a retail site we are losing a lot of business. I would very much appreciate it if anyone has the time to amswer. Howard0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Duplicate content
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are: www.domainname/directory-name/ www.domainname/directory-name/index.php All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page. Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
How to resolve duplicate content and title errors?
Hello, I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand. My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages. A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle. So my question: Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | jannkuzel0