Multible Dublicate Titles & Descriptions
-
Hi,
I reviewed a site for a client recently and noticed when I produced a crawl report (SEOmoz) that there were thousands of pages with the same content. This is because the developer added a ticket booking system which has a page for each day up to 2017 (5 years).
I see in my campaign monitoring that this results in 9,445 duplicate content errors.
The site is only 3 months old and has a Google PR of 4 and is ranking reasonable well for main keywords.
Just wondering if there is a way to fix this or should I leave it. Is it eventually going to result in problems?.
I cant see these pages when I view the server with FTP - perhaps they are dynamically created.
Pat
-
I looked at your campaign, and you've essentially got two options here:
(1) You could add a unique element to the title tag, like the availability date.
(2) You could canonicalize or de-index the variations.
Keri's warning is correct about the home-page, but it looks like this is a stand-alone page and rel-canonical would be viable. That would clean up your index gradually, but it would also remove the individual availability pages from the search index (and ranking contention), so it does depend a bit on your strategy.
For the site 9K pages, is quite a bit. The other thing you could do is change the system to only create links for dates with available events. I notice you have a lot of blank dates. Linking those serves no purpose, either for users or Google (and is just creating worthless pages, essentially). If you did that, a lot of these would clean up over time.
You might also consider just blocking the calendar links at some point - in other words, go back 3-6 months, but then don't bother. Don't make Google crawl 5 years worth of past dates.
-
That may not be the proper use of the canonical tag. You generally don't want to do a rel canonical on everything to your home page. I've asked Dr. Pete to step in and add some advice, as he's the expert in that tag.
-
Thanks for your help.
Will try that solution.
Pat
-
Hi,
Use Colonical tag
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
-
How unique should meta descriptions be?
This is something I've been wondering for a while but can't seem to find any advice on. My website features ~60 different companies, each having their own profile page. When optimizing for SEO, how unique should each page's meta description be? Put another way, can I be penalized if the descriptions are all identical except for the company name I include? Any thoughts, resources, or best practices are appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | ericstites0 -
Google Showing H1 Title Instead of Doc Title in Search Results?
I see this often for my website: Google displays my pages' H1 title instead of the document title in its search results. Is there any particular reason for this? Do we have any kind of control on this?
On-Page Optimization | | sbrault740 -
Head description tag, what now
Recently I heard Google virtually dropping the description tag for seo scoring? and it takes the data off the page, however one of my clients description is just pulling a url rather than any content from the page. is there some way thats ethical to suggest a description to google?
On-Page Optimization | | Shuffled0 -
Meta description template - will i penalised? Similar but not the same.
UPDATE to original question: Ok can I also add, as a solution, could I use %%title%% | A Commercial Property Website that deals exclusively with Industrial Property, Land and Investments For Sale or Let across Scotland. In Yoast as a meta description - so the descriptions will have individual titles but the rest the same? Or will I be penalised? This is for the 1000 or so listings, but I'll write completely unique descriptions for the pages? We have taken on the marketing and SEO of a site that we didn't build. After the first crawl report there were 103 errors, 760 warnings and 990 notices. Including a lot of 301s - which I'm confused as is a brand new site. http://www.shedfinders.com/ I've made some changes in the editor to ensure unique page titles so errors should come down. However i wanted to ask advice how best to optimise a site like this ... people come on they list an industrial property and then those in the market to let or sell can browse and then get more details on industrial property they like the look of. So there are lots of listings going on that aren't correctly optimised ... should these manually all have meta descriptions and rewrite headers etc? Ideally the listings would rank themselves in Google - but I'm going to no index some of the other less relevant pages. Keen to hear your feedback. Thanks, Laura
On-Page Optimization | | lauratagdigital0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Duplicate Page Title
Hi All, I'm new in SEOMoz and have some questions after I have already spend 2-3 days trying to resolve the problems identified from Crawling one of my clients websites. I get quite a lot of Duplicate Page Conntent and Page Titles warnings and trying to find a workaround through the forums and posts. I continuously get this error on most of my pages: URL: http://domain.com/benefits with the same Page but with a WWW in front URL: http://www.domain.com/benefits Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thanks, Athos
On-Page Optimization | | athosk0 -
Meta descriptions
Whats the deal with the date at the start of the meta descriptions? I have not really looked into this but I'm guessing its a blog thing? Take this search http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=6packproject#hl=en&xhr=t&q=interview+with+paul+knight&cp=26&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=interview+with+paul+knight&pbx=1&fp=835cd241c8d51fff The beautifully crafted meta description is now being cut short even though its within the character limit and is now only showing 36 characters! Is there a way to remove this? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | CraigAddyman0