Is reported duplication on the pages or their canonical pages?
-
There are several sections getting flagged for duplication on one of our sites:
http://mysite.com/section-1/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-2/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-3/?something=X&confirmed=trueEach of the above are showing as having duplicates of the other sections. Indeed, these pages are exactly the same (it's just an SMS confirmation page you enter your code in), however, they all have canonical links back to the section (without the query string), i.e. section-1, section-2 and section-3 respectively.
These three sections have unique content and aren't flagged up for duplications themselves, so my questions are:
Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates, and if so why are the canonical links being ignored?
or
Are the canonical pages without the query strings the duplicates, and if so why don't they appear as URLs in their own right in the duplicate content report?
I am guessing it's the former, but I can't figure out why it would ignore the canonical links. Any ideas?
Thanks
-
This is good news sugar-coating bad news Thanks!
-
Hi,
The URLs that are reported by the crawl as being duplicates are the duplicate pages. Unfortunately the way the crawl from SEOMoz works, it does not factor the rel=canonical tag when reporting duplicates. In other words, even with the tag implemented, it will still report these pages as duplicates. Don't worry though, as long as the tag is implemented, the search engines should treat the canonical like a 301 redirect and not penalise you for duplicate content.
So to answer your question:
Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates? - Yes.
Hope that helps,
Adam
-
Hey,
It's kind of tricky to answer this without seeing at least two of the category pages but I am guessing that the duplication is in the category pages themselves and if they are simply very thin pages with little to differentiate category A from category B then there is your problem.
Rather than look at the web tool, if you export the spreadsheet this is a lot easier to understand and for each page there is a duplication column which has a comma separated list of the pages that are being flagged as possible duplicates so this should answer your question.
What to do though?
I may be telling you how to suck eggs but this is always a good read when it comes to thin content problems and solutions:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-contentIf it was me, and these pages are thin, but that is the way they are supposed to be, and they are not really search landing pages then there is a good argument to noindex them and remove the possibility of them causing you any problems. If you do this, next time the campaign tool crawls your site they will be ignored and will not show up as a possible duplicate.
Obviously, from a Panda perspective, if these pages are listed as thin, they could be damaging other pages on the site so it is certainly an issue worth addressing.
Hope this helps!
Marcus
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
-
Which is better? One dynamically optimised page, or lots of optimised pages?
For the purpose of simplicity, we have 5 main categories in the site - let's call them A, B, C, D, E. Each of these categories have sub-category pages e.g. A1, A2, A3. The main area of the site consists of these category and sub-category pages. But as each product comes in different woods, it's useful for customers to see all the product that come in a particular wood, e.g. walnut. So many years ago we created 'woods' pages. These pages replicate the categories & sub-categories but only show what is available in that particular wood. And of course - they're optimised much better for that wood. All well and good, until recently, these specialist page seem to have dropped through the floor in Google. Could be temporary, I don't know, and it's only a fortnight - but I'm worried. Now, because the site is dynamic, we could do things differently. We could still have landing pages for each wood, but of spinning off to their own optimised specific wood sub-category page, they could instead link to the primary sub-category page with a ?search filter in the URL. This way, the customer is still getting to see what they want. Which is better? One page per sub-category? Dynamically filtered by search. Or lots of specific sub-category pages? I guess at the heart of this question is? Does having lots of specific sub-category pages lead to a large overlap of duplicate content, and is it better keeping that authority juice on a single page? Even if the URL changes (with a query in the URL) to enable whatever filtering we need to do.
On-Page Optimization | | pulcinella2uk0 -
I am trying to better understand solving the duplicate content issues highlighted in your recent crawl report of our site - www.thehomesites.com.
Below are some of the urls highlighted as having duplicate content -
On-Page Optimization | | urahul
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/76105
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/44135
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/75227
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/94501 These are neighborhood reports generated for 4 different zip codes. We use a standard template to create these reports. What are some of the steps we can take to avoid these pages being categorized as duplicate content?0 -
Canonical rel
I am having a few issues understanding the whole report card and canonical issue. I have a wordpress blog www.theseolab.com.au. When i created the blog i had setup http://theseolab.com.au and i thought that was my mistake. When i ran the on page report for www.theseolab.com.au . It said that my canonical was http://theseolab.com. So i changed it and my canonical points to http://www.theseolab.com.au. 5 days later i run the on page again and it still says that there are issues and it still shows that my website canonical is not pointing to the right link. Does it take time to update or am i missing something?
On-Page Optimization | | theseolab0 -
Mass Duplicate Content
Hi guys Now that the full crawl is complete I've found the following: http://www.trespass.co.uk/mens-onslow-02022 http://www.trespass.co.uk/mens-moora-01816 http://www.trespass.co.uk/site/writeReview?ProductID=1816 http://www.trespass.co.uk/site/writeReview?ProductID=2022 The first 2 duplicate content is easily fixed by writing better product descriptions for each product (a lot of hours needed) but still an easy fix. The last 2 are review pages for each product which are all the same except for the main h1 text. My thinking is to add no index and no follow to all of these review pages? The site will be changing to magento very soon and theres still a lot of work to do. If anyone has any other suggestions or can spot any other issues, its appreciated. Kind regards Robert
On-Page Optimization | | yournetbiz1 -
Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages
The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site. As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products). My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this. My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com Robin
On-Page Optimization | | robbowebbo0 -
On Page Report Card F Grade Critical Factors
The website and page in question is http://www.upstrap-pro.com/ I sell non-slip camera straps and FYI for key word(s) camera strap(s) we were for a number of years on page 1 or 2. Google sold our registered trade-name _UP_strap® all over the web including Amazon. And of course we were hijacked for the keyword. Be that as it may According to SEOMOZ there are many errors on our homepage. I am having the host look at a number of SEOMOZ's report findings. Two critical findings that are making me nuts because I do not have the tech chops to understand why are: 1) Accessible to Engines <dl> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Pages that can't be crawled or indexed have no opportunity to rank in the results. Before tweaking keyword targeting or leveraging other optimization techniques, it's essential to make sure this page is accessible.</dd> </dl> 2) Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical <dl> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL</dd> <dd>So here is the code:</dd> <dd>```
On-Page Optimization | | Asteg
<html xmlns="<a class="attribute-value">http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml</a>"> <head> <title>DSLR-Camera-Straps Award Winning Non~Slip Shoulder Strapstitle> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">An Amazing Camera Strap that will NOT slip off your shoulder! Neck straps are bad for your neck & camera slings are bulky. Easy 60 day money back return policy.</a>" /> <meta http-equiv="<a class="attribute-value">Content-type</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html;charset=UTF-8</a>" /> <base href="http://www.upstrap-pro.com/Merchant2/" /> <link type="<a class="attribute-value">text/css</a>" rel="<a class="attribute-value">stylesheet</a>" href="css/00000002/cssui.css" media="" /> <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.upstrap-pro.com/" /> </dl>0 -
Page title
So if we have a main category page on our site (mines an ecommerce site), do we go for more than that main keyword phrase for that category of products, or is it better to just keep it by itself, and not utilize the 65-70 characters available?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0 -
Duplicate page content errors
Site just crawled and report shows many duplicate pages but doesn't tell me which ones are dups of each other. For you experienced duplicate page experts, do you have a subscription with copyscape and pay $.05 per test? What is the best way to clear these? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | joemas990