Finding the source of duplicate content URL's
-
We have a website that displays a number of products. The product has variations (sizes) and unfortunately every size has its own URL (for now anyway). Needless to say, this causes duplicate content issues. (And of course, we are looking to change the URL's for our site as soon as possible)
However, even though these duplicate URL's exist, you should not be able to land on them by navigating through the site. In theory, the site should always display the link to the smallest size. It seems that there is a flaw in our system somewhere, as these links are now found in our campaign here on SEOmoz.
My question: is there any way to find the crawl path that lead to the URL's that shouldn't have been found, so we can locate the problem?
-
Using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free version to download will crawl 500 URLs, paid version [99 GBP for a yearly license] will crawl as much as you want), you can see all of the inlinks to a particular page. So run a crawl of the site, you should find those pages with Screaming Frog, and then you can view the inlinks to those pages. Visit the inlinks, and check the code for the links to the page you're looking for - this will quickly show you where the links are to the pages you're trying to hide.
Also, have you checked the sitemap - the CMS might create links to these pages in the sitemap.
good luck and let me know if you need any more help with this.
Mark
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
-
Can someone kindly explain what 'Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags' means? Is this a critical error and how can it be rectified?
Can someone kindly explain what 'Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags' means? Is this a critical error and how can it be rectified?
Moz Pro | | JoshMcLean0 -
Are there tools to discover duplicate content issues with the other websites?
We have issues with users copy-pasting content from other sources into our site. The only way I know to find out, is to manually (!!) copy a snippet of their text into google, to see if I get results from other sites. I have been googling for tools to help automate this process, but without luck. Can you recommend any?
Moz Pro | | betternow0 -
Duplicate page content and title
hi,
Moz Pro | | solutionforweb
i have a serious issue with my site. my website contains 21 pages. but during my weekly report, moz found 84 errors. i.e 42 errors in duplicate page content and 42 errors in duplicate page title... when i see the error in details.. all my 21 links are displaying twice. for example http://domain.com/
http://domain.com/page1.html
http://domain.com/page2.html
and
http://www.domain.com/
http://www.domain.com/page1.html
http://www.domain.com/page2.html so, the same link is repeating twice with www and without www. how do i resolve this error? so please kindly anyone help me....0 -
What is the best ranking checker solution for 100's of sites
Hello, We used IBP for over 2 years and it worked great. We were able to schedule every clients site to auto run and email our clients. Now IBP is terrible due to Google's new updates. We are looking for something cost effective since we have 100's of websites we check on a weekly basis. We are either looking for a great software that uses proxies to check, or a service that offers unlimited sites and is cheap per month. We have searched for many, however there are so many that we aren't sure what is good and what isn't. We tried Jonathan Ledgers new one and it's not good, we looked into Web CEO and it's per amount of websites which is expensive. We tried cute rank tracker which is free and added proxies and it doesn't work, it lags out and doesn't even track ranks properly. It wouldn't hurt if it had a built in report analysis of the website as well. So whats a good one?
Moz Pro | | MarketingOfAmerica0 -
Ways to Find Potential Backlink Providers
We are doing a backlink campaign for a personal development training company that is a pretty good authority with lots of good long articles. So far I found competitors ranking for our keywords - about 10 of them - and analyzed their backlinks We found about 40 possible backlink providers. What's the next step to find more? I know 2 possibilities so far: do inurl commands in google to find related sites with resource sections - how do I do this? Analyze the backlinks of the sites that make up competitor's backlinks.] - how do I organize this huge task? What else is there?
Moz Pro | | BobGW0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
The SeoMoz crawler has found many pages like this on my site with /?Letter=Letter, e.g. http://www.johnsearles.com/metal-art-tiles/?D=A. I believe it is finding multiple caches of a page and identifying them as duplicates. Is there any way to screen out these multiple cache results?
Moz Pro | | johnsearles0 -
Finding page authority for a list of sites
I went to Distilled's linklove conference earlier this week. Many of the presenters showed spreadsheets where they had pulled in Page Authority for a long list of sites. What tool can you use to quickly do this? For instance, I want to be able to copy a list of 100 sites into a tool and have it spit out the PA for every site...anybody know how to do this?
Moz Pro | | znotes0 -
Why are these pages considered duplicate page content?
A recent crawl diagnostic for a client's website had several new duplicate page content errors. The problem is, I'm not sure where the error comes from since the content in the webpage is different from one another. Here's the pages that SEOMOZ reported to have duplicate page content errors: http://www.imaginet.com.ph/wireless-internet-service-providers-term http://www.imaginet.com.ph/antivirus-term http://www.imaginet.com.ph/berkeley-internet-name-domain http://www.imaginet.com.ph/customer-premises-equipment-term The only thing similar that I see is the headline which says "Glossary Terms Used in this Site" - I hope that the one sentence is the reason for the error. Any input is appreciated as I want to find out the best solution for my client's website errors. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | TheNorthernOffice790