SEO Mox reporting all pages & titles as duplicate, but this is not the case.
-
HI, I am confused . This week SEOMoz is reporting that all my pages and pages titles are duplicate. This is not the case. I have added geo meta tags to each page - could this be causing the duplicate page content condition? I have no theory about the title duplicate condition. I have uploaded pdfs of these seomoz reports here: http://www.2shared.com/document/JAgS2Ni9/Issue_-Duplicate_Page_Content.html http://www.2shared.com/document/gyXcMsoP/Issue-Duplicate_Page_Title-.html Help please. thanks.
-
Rel canonical is definitely NOT the preferred way to handle this kind of situation, IMO, Zach. Best practice is to run the 301 redirect to give the Search Engines (and users!) the clearest message as to the Fully Qualified Domain.
This isn't a matter of the 2 URLs needing to exist, which is when you use rel canonical. The second variation serves no possible useful purpose, so should be redirected in order to get rid of it altogether.( In my experience, rel canonical also doesn't seem to reliably pass page influence the way 301s do.)
For example, by doing the redirect, the URL will always appear in the address bar as the www version, so if someone copies that address, they'll always end up using the canonical FQDN.
That said, Richard, you can also use Google Webmaster Tools to tell the Search Engines that you want your www version to be considered canonical. It's just one more way of signalling to them.
Once this is working, you're going to want to be very careful to always use the FQDN yuorself - ie always write links using the full www.weddingdancelessons.co.uk, whether on your own site or when you're getting links back to yourself.
-
That new rule won't catch all the related subpages, Richard.
Here's the standard version I use - give it a shot, then test it.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^weddingdancelessons.com.au$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au$1 [R=301,L]Paul
-
yes thanks.
I already had:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^weddingdancelessons.com.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/" [R=301,L]in my .htaccess file but these errors as per the ref you provided. So I am not sure if this is working.
Would
Redirect 301 http://weddingdancelessons.com.au http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au
solve the problem ?
-
I think you should continue looking at doing a 301 redirect instead.
You can use the canonical tag, but you should do so in cases where you intend to have different URLs for one main page (e.g. www.example.com/blue-widget.html, www.example.com/widgets/blue-widget.html). Here is a another question regarding canonicals where Ryan Kent provides a good explanation for this.
You can learn more about 301 redirecting here. Yoast also provides some information for how to do it here.
-
Thanks Paul,
so would this be the correct syntax in line 1 of .htacess file?
Redirect 301 http://weddingdancelessons.com.au http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au
Thanks.
-
We literally just wrote on the same error I ran through screaming frog, and there is definitely duplicate content because of non-canonical URLs.
-
Hello Richard, I just ran your site through a tool called screaming frog, which instantly crawls your site and allows me to view errors such as duplicate titles and the like. Here is what happened, when Screaming Frog, and SEOmoz crawls your site, they see both URLS: http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html http://weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html Both have the same title: "Wedding Dance Lessons Sydney | Dancing Lessons to couples to learn their first dance and to look confident at their wedding." Even though to humans there is little deliniaton between the two, it is exteremely important to search engines. The solution to this is to use the rel="cannonical" tag check out this blog post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not, it's dated but still relevant to your case. Once all of your pages have that tag, your SEO issues should resolve themselves Please let me know if you have any more questions Zach
-
As near as I can tell, Richard, the crawl is reporting the issue because you don't have canonicalization of the primary domain of the website. Big words to mean that your site is resolving at both www.weddingdancelessons.com.au and weddingdancelessons.com.au (without the www)
Search Engines and therefore Mozbot will see these as two different sets of pagesx, therefore duplicating each other.
If you look down the list of pages reported, you'll see that some are listed with the www and some without.
What should happen is that one of those two versions is 301-redirected to the other. Best practice is usually to redirect the non-www to the www version, although it can be worth double-checking which version has more incoming links/page authority before making the final choice.
Since this looks like it's just happened, it may be that there have been changes made to the .htaccess file that have messed up previous settings, or it may be that the crawler just caught the dupes this time.
Paul
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
-
Does user engagement or content of pages requiring login help SEO?
Hi! Our company is trying to come up with a few pages with some manuals to teach our users how to use our products. However, these pages require username and password. My understanding is that user engagement will help a website's keyword rankings and Google will not be able to crawl or have access to pages requiring login as it doesn't have username and password. Based on that idea, does that mean all the content and user engagement on those pages requiring login won't help our overall SEO? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | EverettChen0 -
Why are my 301 redirects and duplicate pages (with canonicals) still showing up as duplicates in Webmaster Tools?
My guess is that in time Google will realize that my duplicate content is not actually duplicate content, but in the meantime I'd like to get your guys feedback. The reporting in Webmaster Tools looks something like this. Duplicates /url1.html /url2.html /url3.html /category/product/url.html /category2/product/url.html url3.html is the true canonical page in the list above._ url1.html,_ and url2.html are old URLs that 301 to url3.html. So, it seems my bases are covered there. _/category/product/url.html _and _/category2/product/url.html _ do not redirect. They are the same page as url3.html. Each of the category URLs has a canonical URL of url3.html in the header. So, it seems my bases are covered there as well. Can I expect Google to pick up on this? Why wouldn't it understand this already?
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Duplicate Title Tags
Hi, Are these 2 title tags different enough? Notice only the 's' on Templates is switched <colgroup><col width="559"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Studio33
| Invoice Templates | Invoice Template | invoicing Software | Invoice Software Invoice Template | Invoice Templates | invoicing Software | Invoice Software | Thanks0 -
We have over 3000 duplicate page titles, please help!
Hi, we did a crawl report and have over 3000 duplicate page titles. I'm not sure why this is happening... could it be because we have put posts in multiple categories? Can anyone help us with a quick fix? our site is www.stayathomemum.com.au thank you kindly, Chris
Technical SEO | | stayathomemum0 -
Does it hurt to have a dynamic counter in your page title?
Currently we work with page titles which display the number of products we have as a counter. This number is highly volatile and can change every day, so that our page title changes all the time. We did this to improve user experience, meet expectations and improve click through rates. Question is whether this can hurt our rankings and if someone has experimented with this or has experience with this?
Technical SEO | | ElmarReizen0 -
Should I add my brand name to every page title
Currently for every page I automatically add my brand name Ie: poduct xxx - brand name product yyy - brand name. is this considered good or bad practice?
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
Duplicate Page Titles
I had an issue where I was getting duplicate page titles for my index file. The following URLs were being viewed as duplicates: www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/index.html www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/ I tried many solutions, and came across the rel="canonical". So i placed the the following in my index.html: I did a crawl, and it seemed to correct the duplicate content. Now I have a new message, and just want to verify if this is bad for search engines, or if it is normal. Please view the attached image. i9G89.png
Technical SEO | | pixel830 -
Google picking up wrong page title
Hi, When searching for "Tottenham Forum" on google.co.uk (link below) http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tottenham+forum&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a The site I manage (THFCTalk.com) is listed as 4th in the search results, but was hacked a few months ago and the search results lists the page title as "Free Shipping. Order Cialis Online. - Online Pharmacy" when the actual page title of THFCTalk is not actually set at that. Any idea how to fix this so Google updates this header on the search results? - as it is surely putting people off from clicking on our search result
Technical SEO | | WalesDragon0