Testing for duplicate content and title tags
-
Hi there,
I have been getting both Duplicate Page content and Duplicate Title content warnings on my crawl diagnostics report for one of my campaigns. I did my research, and implemented the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools. This did not resolve the crawl diagnostics warnings, and upon further research I discovered the preferred domain would only be noted by Google and not other bots like Roger. My only issue was that when I ran an SEOmoz crawl test on the same domain, I saw none of the duplicate content or title warnings yet they still appear on my crawl diagnostics report. I have now implemented a fix in my .htaccess file to 301 redirect to the www. domain. I want to check if it's worked, but since the crawl test did not show the issue last time I don't think I can rely on that. Can you help please?
Thanks,
Claire
-
Thanks Joseph. Very helpful.
-
Hello Claire,
I really don't think you are going to get those errors show up on the next crawl.
Just on another note after seeing your URL...
I would also code all of the links in the site with full absolute links.
I see the links as
<li> href=" /our-services/diabetes-support/get-started/"> Diabetes Supporta>li> I would add the **http://www.** in front of all those links.
-
Thanks Jared, that's awesome.
-
You can always check by testing in your browser but the best way is to check the header response to make sure the server is sending the proper response (a 301) - your landing pages look good (see below). I use Live HTTP Headers which is a firefox plugin - hers what it tell you:
http://pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross-village/
GET /our-pharmacies/applecross-village/ HTTP/1.1
Host: pharmacy777.com.au
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2012 03:23:17 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)
Location: http://www.pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross-village/So the redirect is working. The only thing i noticed was that the home page instantly switched to www and didnt even return a 301 so it appears you may have implemented a redirect there outside of htaccess.
If your report is still showing duplicates make sure that its not the trailing slash. Your URLs can be loaded as such:
http://www.pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross/
http://www.pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross
The best way to find out if the SEOMoz report is counting these as dupes is to Export the crawl report to CSV (top right of crawl report). Then go all the way to the far right column called 'duplicate pages' and sort it alphabetically. This column will show you all of the duplicate urls for each particular URL row. Lots of times you can find little 'surprises' here - that csv report is priceless!
-
Hi Joseph,
Yes, I have done this test and it appears to be working. I just want to be sure I'm not going to be faced with a load of warnings when my next crawl runs on the weekend, as when I implemented the Webmaster preferred domain what happened was"
-
implemented preferred domain
-
rank crawl test - looked to have resolved the issue but then
-
4 days later the scheduled crawl report ran, all errors still present.
Luckily I told the client I had to wait for the report results and didn't tell think it was resolved after the crawl test looked OK!! This time I've run the crawl test and done the manual test you suggested, but I want to be able to feed back to the client today if I can (confidently), and I no longer trust the test.
Thanks very much for your answer, it's always good to have someone validate your own approach.
Cheers,
Claire
-
-
-
If I understand correctly you want to see if your re-direct has fixed your duplicate content issue.
Right now you still get the error ...
I would simply type the url in the address bar, with and without the www. and see if both show up.
If the re - direct is working then only one should show up , the other should re - direct immediately.
If they both show up do then your .htaccess code may have a mistake.
hope that helps.
-
Update: Reporting can be historic - so you are probably looking at a report from an older crawl.
-
Hi Claire - we need the url of your site to check the headers on the 301 redirect!
Definitely a good way to fix this is via htaccess like you are suggesting you did. When I get a new client its in the campaign startup list and it works well. Make sure there arent any other issues like the infamous trailing slash causing duplication. If you provide the URL a quick check can be made.
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
-
Website title duplicates in SEO description
Hi - My website title (company name) repeats in the SEO description. My host service is Square Space. How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | Peeker
Thanks! Paula board-directors0 -
Duplicate content for vehicle inventory.
Hey all, In the automotive industry... When uploading vehicle inventory to a website I'm concerned with duplicate content issues. For example, 1 vehicle is uploaded to the main manufacturers website, then again to the actual dealerships website & then again to Craigslist & even sometimes to a group site. The information is all the same, description, notes, car details & images. What would you all recommend for alleviating duplicate content issues? Should I be using the rel canonical back to the manufacturers website? Once the vehicle is sold all pages disappear. Thanks so much for any advice.
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Duplicate content in product listing
We have "duplicate content" warning in our moz report which mostly revolve around our product listing (eCommerce site) where various filters return 0 results (and hence show the same content on the page). Do you think those need to be addressed, and if so how would you prevent product listing filters that appearing as duplicate content pages? should we use rel=canonical or actually change the content on the page?
Technical SEO | | erangalp0 -
Duplicate Content Due to Pagination
Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss. While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful... Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages. I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform. Thank you for taking the time to read my question!
Technical SEO | | josh3300 -
Wordpress: Tags generate duplicate Content - just delete the tags!?
Asking people, they say tags are bad and spamy and as I can see they generate all my duplicate page content issues. So the big question is, why Google very often prefers to show in SERPS these Tag-URLS... so it can't be too bad! :)))? Then after some research I found the "Term Optimizer" on Yoast.com ... that should help exactly with this problem but it seems not to be available anymore? So may be there another plugin that can help... or just delete all tags from my blog? and install permanent redirects?
Technical SEO | | inlinear
Is this the solution?0 -
Localized domains and duplicate content
Hey guys, In my company we are launching a new website and there's an issue it's been bothering me for a while. I'm sure you guys can help me out. I already have a website, let's say ABC.com I'm preparing a localized version of that website for the uk so we'll launch ABC.co.uk Basically the websites are going to be exactly the same with the difference of the homepage. They have a slightly different proposition. Using GeoIP I will redirect the UK traffic to ABC.co.uk and the rest of the traffic will still visit .com website. May google penalize this? The site itself it will be almost the same but the homepage. This may count as duplicate content even if I'm geo-targeting different regions so they will never overlap. Thanks in advance for you advice
Technical SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Duplicate Page Content
I've got several pages of similar products that google has listed as duplicate content. I have them all set up with rel="prev" and rel="next tags telling google that they are part of a group but they've still got them listed as duplicates. Is there something else I should do for these pages or is that just a short falling of googles webmaster tools? One of the pages: http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/walnut-countertop-9.html
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
High number of Duplicate Page titles and Content related to index.php
It appears that every page on our site (www.bridgewinners.com) also creates a version of itself with a suffix. This results in Seomoz indicating that there are thousands of duplicate titles and content. 1. Does this matter? If so, how much? 2. How do I eliminate this (we are using joomla)? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jfeld2220