Advice needed on how to handle alleged duplicate content and titles
-
Hi
I wonder if anyone can advise on something that's got me scratching my head.
The following are examples of urls which are deemed to have duplicate content and title tags. This causes around 8000 errors, which (for the most part) are valid urls because they provide different views on market data. e.g. #1 is the summary, while #2 is 'Holdings and Sector weightings'.
#3 is odd because it's crawling the anchored link. I didn't think hashes were crawled?
I'd like some advice on how best to handle these, because, really they're just queries against a master url and I'd like to remove the noise around duplicate errors so that I can focus on some other true duplicate url issues we have.
Here's some example urls on the same page which are deemed as duplicates.
1) http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE
-
http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Holdings-and-sectors-weighting?s=IVPM:LSE
-
http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE&widgets=1
What's the best way to handle this?
-
-
I would defiantly not tell Google to ignore parameters since you have pages ranking high with URL parameters in them.
Be careful if you do implement a canonical, because you could end up removing a few good ranking pages since the URL parameter pages are the ones currently ranking best.
Personally i would just ignore these errors since Google has done a pretty good job choosing the best page already.
You could block Rogerbot from crawling parameter pages.
-
Thanks. This is the only solution I can think of too but the information on each of the tabs is actually different, so technically it is a unique page.
That said the likelihood of someone searching for such a specific subset of that data associated with one company or fund is arguably extremely low, which is why i wasn't sure whether to apply a canonical or not, just to reduce the noise.
I suppose another approach is to tell Google to ignore parameter 's' which forms part of the query which loads one of the subsets of data?
Slightly wary of doing that
-
Hi,
The best way to fix this would be to implement the canonical tag, this would stop Google/Rogerbot thinking those pages are duplicated and focus on the URL you specified.
Check this post from Google explaining all about it.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Kyle
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 to Set Up Canonical Tags to Eliminate Duplicate Content Error
Google Webmaster Tools under HTML improvements is showing duplicate meta descriptions for 2 similar pages. The 2 pages are for building address. The URL has several pages because there are multiple property listings for this building. The URLs in question are: www.metro-manhattan.com/601-west-26th-street-starrett-lehigh-building-contains-executive-office-space-manhattan/page/3 www.metro-manhattan.com/601-west-26th-street-starrett-lehigh-building-contains-executive-office-space-manhattan How do I correct this error using canonical tags? Do I enter the URL of the 1<sup>st</sup> page under “Canonical URL” under “Advanced” to show Google that these pages are one and the same? If so, do I enter the entire URL into this field (www.metro-manhattan.com /601-west-26th-street-starrett-lehigh-building-contains-executive-office-space-manhattan) or an abbreviated version (/601-west-26th-street-starrett-lehigh-building-contains-executive-office-space-manhattan)? Please see attached images. Thanks!! Alan rUspIzk 34aSQ7k
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Is This Considered Duplicate Content?
My site has entered SEO hell and I am not sure how to fix it. Up until 18 months ago I had tremendous success on Google and Bing and now my website appears below my Facebook page for the term "Direct Mail Raleigh." What makes it even more frustrating is my competitors have done no SEO and they are dominating this keyword. I thought that the issue was due to harmful inbound links and two months ago I disavowed ones that were clearly spam. Somehow my site has actually gone down! I have a blog that I have updated infrequently and I do not know if it I am getting punished for duplicate content. On Google Webmaster Tools it says I have 279 crawled and indexed pages. Yesterday when I ran the MOZ crawl check I was amazed to find 1150 different webpages on my site. Despite the fact that it does not appear on the webmaster tools I have three different webpages due to the format that the Wordpress blog was created: "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/part2leadershi/", "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/page/91/" and "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/category/competent-leadership/page/3/" What does not make sense to me is why Google only indexed 279 webpages AND why MOZ did not identify these three webpages as duplicate content with the Crawl Test Tool. Does anyone have any ideas? Would it be as easy as creating a massive robot.txt file and just putting 2 of the 3 URLs in that file? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DR700950 -
Avoiding Duplicate Content - Same Product Under Different Categories
Hello, I am taking some past advise and cleaning up my content navigation to only show 7 tabs as opposed to the 14 currently showing at www.enchantingquotes.com. I am creating a "Shop by Room" and "Shop by Category" link, which is what my main competitors do. My concern is the duplicate content that will happen since the same item will appear in both categories. Should I no follow the "Shop by Room" page? I am confused as to when I should use a no follow as opposed to a canonical tag? Thank you so much for any advise!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lepasti0 -
Google WMT Showing Duplicate Content, But There is None
In the HTML improvements section of Google Webmaster Tools, it is showing duplicate content and I have verified that the duplicate content they are listing does not exist. I actually have another duplicate content issue I am baffled by, but that it already being discussed on another thread. These are the pages they are saying have duplicate META descriptions, http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/bathroom-remodeling.html (META from bathroom remodeling page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Bathroom Remodeling Washington DC, Bathroom Renovation Washington DC, Bath Remodel, Northern Virginia,DC, VA, Washington, Fairfax, Arlington, Virginia</a>" /> http://www.hanneganremodeling.com/estimate-request.html (META From estimate page) <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Free estimates basement remodeling, bathroom remodeling, home additions, renovations estimates, Washington DC area</a>" /> WlO9TLh
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebbyNabler0 -
Duplicate Page Content / Titles Help
Hi guys, My SEOmoz crawl diagnostics throw up thousands of Dup Page Content / Title errors which are mostly from the forum attached to my website. In-particular it's the forum user's profiles that are causing the issue, below is a sample of the URLs that are being penalised: http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=1308 I thought that by adding - http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp to my robots.txt file under 'Ignore' would cause the bots to overlook the thousands of profile pages but the latest SEOmoz crawl still picks them up. My question is, how can I get the bots to ignore these profile pages (they don't contain any useful content) and how much will this be affecting my rankings (bearing in mind I have thousands of errors for dup content and dup page titles). Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
Hi I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors. The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages. I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this. The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening. Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alextanner0 -
Hierachy in a Title Tag Needed?
When coding the title tags of a website, is it important to note the hierarchy of the website so the search engine can find that page? So, for example, the title tag would be, for a subcategory: Webpage Subcategory>Category>Website name Does this help the search engine rankings at all? Or can the search engines figure out the hierarchy by reading a sitemap or the HTML readable navigation? Then you could focus on the descriptive keywords of the subcategory page for the title tag. Also, should you always include the site name in the title tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConnellyPartners0