Why does Crawl Diagnostics report this as duplicate content?
-
Hi guys,
we've been addressing a duplicate content problem on our site over the past few weeks. Lately, we've implemented rel canonical tags in various parts of our ecommerce store, over time, and observing the effects by both tracking changes in SEOMoz and Websmater tools.
Although our duplicate content errors are definitely decreasing, I can't help but wonder why some URLs are still being flagged with duplicate content by our SEOmoz crawler.
Here's an example, taken directly from our Crawl Diagnostics Report:
URL with 4 Duplicate Content errors:
/safety-lights.htmlDuplicate content URLs:
/safety-lights.html ?cat=78&price=-100
/safety-lights.html?cat=78&dir=desc&order=position /safety-lights.html?cat=78 /safety-lights.html?manufacturer=514What I don't understand, is all of the URLS with URL parameters have a rel canonical tag pointing to the 'real' URL
/safety-lights.htmlSo why is SEOMoz crawler still flagging this as duplicate content?
-
So glad I could help get this figured out! Sometimes it just takes another set of eyes.
-Chiaryn
-
Good catch Chiaryn! Totally didn't see this.
Essentially two URLs end up displaying the same content: 1 is the URL that's picked up by google from our XML sitemap, and the other is a dynamic URL with filtering parameters based on a one level higher category URL.
The canonical tags were set up in such a way that they point to the base category, which in this case, are different, even though the content is the same.
We will address this.
Thanks!
-
Hi there,
I looked into your campaign and it seems that this is happening because of where your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example, accessories/lights.html?cat=78&price=-100 is considered a duplicate of accessories/lights/safety-lights.html?manufacturer=514 because the canonical tag for the first page is accessories/lights.html while the canonical for the second URL is accessories/lights/safety-lights.html.
Since the canonical tags point to different pages it is assumed that accessories/lights.html and accessories/lights/safety-lights.html are likely to be duplicates themselves.
Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:
Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,
- If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
- If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
- If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
- If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
The examples you've provided actually fall into the fourth example I've listed above.
I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
-Chiaryn
-
Does seem a little odd. Could you post the domain so we can have a more detailed look?
Thanks
Iain - Reload Media
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
-
Duplicate Content/Missing Meta Description | Pages DO NOT EXISIT!
Hello all, For the last few months, Moz has been showing us that our site has roughly 2,000 duplicate content errors. Pages that were actually duplicate content, I took care of accordingly using best practice (301 redirects, canonicalization,etc.). Still remaining after these fixes were errors showing for pages that we have never created. Our homepage is www.primepay.com. An example of pages that are being shown as duplicate content is http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/payroll/online-payroll with a referring page of http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/online-payroll. Some of these are even now showing up as 403 and 404 errors. The only real page on our site within that URL strand is primepay.com/payroll or primepay.com/payroll/online-payroll. Therefore, I am not sure where Moz is getting these pages from. Another issue we are having in relation to duplicate content is that moz is showing old campaign url’s tacked on to our blog page i.e. http://primepay.com/blog?title=&page=2&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogCTA&utm_campaign=IRSblogpost&qt-blog_tabs=1. As of this morning, our duplicate content went from 2,000 to 18,000. I exported all of our crawl diagnostics data and looked to see what the referring pages were, and even they are not pages that we have created. When you click on these links, they take you to a random point in time from the homepage of our blog; some dating back to 2010. I checked our crawl stats in both Google and Bing’s Webmaster tool, and there are no duplicate content or 400 level errors being reporting from their crawl. My team is truly at a loss with trying to resolve this issue and any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | PrimePay0 -
Unable to view crawl test
After doing a crawl test i get a download report. It then downloads in csv form and when I go to view it there is a curruption error or just a load of gibberish signs Can I not see the report onsite?
Moz Pro | | hantaah0 -
To Worry or Not? Duplicate Content Created from Redirect After Login
One of my Moz reports is flagging duplicate content. For example, https://redchairmarket.com/Account/LogOn?ReturnUrl=%2FAccount%2FSaveSearch%3FsearchId%3D0&searchId=0 and https://redchairmarket.com/Account/LogOn?ReturnUrl=%2FAccount%2FSaveSearch%3FsearchId%3D1&searchId=1 are created when a user logs in and the website sends them back to the page they were looking at before. What is the best way to deal with this duplicate issue? How serious is it? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | BrittanyHighland0 -
Question about Crawl Diagnostics - 4xx (Client Error) report
Hi here, I was wondering if there is a way to find out the originating page where a broken link is found from the 4xx (Client Error) report. I can't find a way to know that, and without that information is very difficult for me to fix any possible 404 related issues on my website. Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Moz Pro | | fablau0 -
Does the Crawl Diagnosis - Duplicate Page Content account for a canonical meta tags?
I see the same page listed 3 time (with different query params). But on each I have a meta tag pointing to the correct canonical url. By still seeing all three listed, does that mean there is an error with my meta tag?
Moz Pro | | Simantel0 -
Domain.com and domain.com/index.html duplicate content in reports even with rewrite on
I have a site that was recently hit by the Google penguin update and dropped a page back. When running the site through seomoz tools, I keep getting duplicate content in the reports for domain.com and domain.com/index.html, even though I have a 301 rewrite condition. When I test the site, domain.com/index.html redirects to domain.com for all directories and root. I don't understand how my index page can still get flagged as duplicate content. I also have a redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com. Is there anything else I need to do or add to my htaccess file? Appreciate any clarification on this.
Moz Pro | | anthonytjm0 -
SEOMoz Crawling Only 1 Page
I entered a new site into my dashboard 2 days ago - everything looked kosher, there were a few hundred pages crawled and a whole bunch of errors. I came back this morning to start work on the site and SEOMoz has crawled the site again, this time returning only 1 page and 0 errors. I haven't even logged in to the site since the first crawl, so I couldn't have broken anything. Has anyone seen this before?
Moz Pro | | Junction0 -
How to crawl the whole domain?
Hi, I have a website an e-commerce website with more than 4.600 products. I expect that Seomoz scan check all url's. I don't know why this doesn't happens. The Campaign name is Artigos para festa and should scan the whole domain festaexpress.com. But it crels only 100 pages I even tried to create a new campaign named Festa Express - Root Domain to check if it scans but had the same problem it crawled only 199 pages. Hope to have a solution. Thanks,
Moz Pro | | EduardoCoen
Eduardo0