Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content
-
I've been a Pro Member for nearly a year and I am bound and determined to finally clean up all the crawl errors on our site PracticeRange.com.
We have 180 errors for Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content. I fixed many of the pages that were product pages with duplicate content. Those product descriptions were edited and now have unique content.
However, there remain plenty of the errors that are puzzling. Many of the errors reference the same pages, for example, the Home Page, Login Page and the Search page (our catalog pages).
In the case of the Catalog Page errors, these type pages would have the same title every time "Search" and the results differ according to category.http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=6
http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=15If this is rel=canonical issue, how do I fix it on a search result page? I want each of the different category type pages to be indexed. One of them is no more important than the other. So how would I incorporate the rel=canonical?
In the case of the Home Page errors, I'm really confused. I don't know where to start to fix these. They are the result of a 404 error that leads to the home page. Is the content of the 404 page the culprit since it contains a link to the home page?
Here are examples of the Home Page type of crawl errors.
Thanks ,
-
Thanks Dan,
I appended the asterisk. I also tested the robots.txt in google webmaster tools. It alerted me of the required : colon after the disallow statement. I missed that somehow.
The next crawl should finally ignore those search catalog pages.
Best Regards,
Alan
-
Hi Alan,
It seems like you are only targeting the search page, I would suggest adding a * at the end to capture all variations.
Dan
-
Hi Dan,
Latest SEOMOZ crawl still reports 108 Duplicate Page Titles. Almost all of them are from the Search page.
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=5
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=50
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=51
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=52
etc.....
I added Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx but it still picked it up during the crawl. Here is the robots.txt.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /Admin/
Disallow: /App_Themes/
Disallow: /Assets/
Disallow: /Checkout/
Disallow: /ClientApi/
Disallow: /ConLib/
Disallow: /FCKeditor/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /Install/
Disallow: /Layouts/
Disallow: /Members/
Disallow: /webcharts/
Disallow: /Basket.aspx
Disallow: /BuyProduct.ashx
Disallow: /*.axd$
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspxSitemap: <http: www.practicerange.com="" sitemap.xml="">Sitemap: http://www.practicerange.com/sitemap.xml</http:>
Am I missing something on the syntax to get the crawl to ignore our Search Pages?
Best Regards,
Alan
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | -
Hi Alan,
Have a look in google webmasters to see if the same 404's are occuring there. If so, they typically give you a list of page that generate the error page. It would be best to eliminate these issues at the source first as they will be offering a poor user experience.
As a prevented measure you could run these pages as a disallow, yes. But I fear that this will make it more difficult to detect these issues in future.
Dan
-
Thanks Dan,
Got it. The catalog pages are not beneficial and the duplication could be hurting.
So I added the disallow statement for the Search pages. We will see if it fixes the problem on our next crawl and change syntax as needed.
Would a similar disallow for the 404.aspx would solve the Home Page 404 crawl errors? Something like...
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/404.aspx?*
Best Regards,
Alan Wills
-
Hi Alan,
This is a two part question. For the search results I would add
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=*
To your robots.txt file. I would probably increase to the entirety of search (by removing the ?m= from the line above), but as I don't completely comprehend how your search section works start with the above. It very rare that search pages offer new content, generally they dilute other pages by duplication.
With your second issue I imagine there are clues in the aspxerrorpath variable. Although I couldn't get any combination of this string to render the below url didn't return to the 404 page like the rest did. Its the tilda (~) in the error string that I think offers the biggest clue.
http://www.practicerange.com/Golf-Training-Aids/Golf-Nets/
Hope this helps,
Dan
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
-
Regarding internal duplicate content
Suppose two of my webpages from the same site are having 30% to 35% common content. The reason behind this common content is that I put same data and images (in the main content area) since both pages are partially related. But, title tag, meta description, h1 tag, urls are different.
On-Page Optimization | | b.me
My questions are Can Google consider it as duplicate content?
Can it hamper the ranking of my pages ?
How can I deal with it?0 -
Duplicate Content - What can be duplicate in two different product pages.
I am having a hard time understanding how my 3 different product pages are being shown up as Duplicate Content in s crawl. Some of my 21 different pages are being shown as duplicate content. Here are 3 of those: 1. http://champu.in/korn-rock-band-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 2. http://champu.in/stop-the-burning-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 3. http://champu.in/funny-t-shirts/absolut-punjabi-red-men-s-round-neck-t-shirt Can someone help me with this. Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | sidjain4you0 -
Tool To Search For Duplicate Content
Hi Is there such a tool that can be use to search a website for duplicate content? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Bossandy0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Forum
Hi Everyone, I just signed up last night and received the crawl stats for my site (ShapeFit.com). Since April of 2011, my site has been severely impacted by Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates and we have lost about 80% of our traffic during that time. I have been trying to follow the guidelines provided by Google to fix the issues and help recover but nothing seems to be working. The majority of my time has been invested in trying to add content to "thin" pages on the site and filing DMCA notices for copyright infringement issues. Since this work has not produced any noticeable recovery, I decided to focus my attention on removing bad backlinks and this is how I found SEOmoz. My question is about duplicate content. The crawl diagnostics showed 6,000 errors for duplicate page content and the same for duplicate page title. After reviewing the details, it looks like almost every page is from the forum (shapefit.com/forum). What's the best way to resolve these issues? Should I completely block the "forum" folder from being indexed by Google or is there something I can do within the forum software to fix this (I use phpBB)? I really appreciate any feedback that would help fix these issues so the site can hopefully start recovering from Panda/Penguin. Thank you, Kris
On-Page Optimization | | shapefit0 -
Is this duplicate content okay?
We have a client who wants to rank locally, nationally and internationally for their products. I wrote a line that goes, "We can ship our products to you whether you’re here in Illinois, nationwide, or international." I added that line after a paragraph or two of unique product description on each of their 30-odd product pages. Will this damage their ranking? I tried researching this but only found full page duplicate content topics. Any advice would be great.
On-Page Optimization | | optimalwebinc0 -
Duplicate Content for Spanish & English Product
Hi There, Our company provides training courses and I am looking to provide the Spanish version of a course that we already provide in English. As it is an e-commerce site, our landing page for the English version gives the full description of the course and all related details. Once the course is purchased, a flash based course launches within a player window and the student begins the course. For the Spanish version of the course, my target customers are English speaking supervisors purchasing the course for their Spanish speaking workers. So the landing page will still be in English (just like the English version of the course) with the same basic description, with the only content differences on that page being the inclusion of the fact that this course is in Spanish and a few details around that. The majority of the content on these two separate landing pages will be exactly the same, as the description for the overall course is the same, just that it's presented in a different language, so it needs to be 2 separate products. My fear is that Google will read this as duplicate content and I will be penalized for it. Is this a possibility or will Google know why I set it up this way and not penalize me? If that is a possibility, how should I go about doing this correctly? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NiallTom0 -
Duplicate page content,
Hi, in my campaign crawls diagnostic, I have a lot of Duplicate page content, but we use canonicalization and I used webmastertool to make sure the campaign parameters are not consider by the Google bot. Can you see what could be my problem, or do you have a tip for me or things to look at ? Thank You VB
On-Page Optimization | | Vale70 -
Home Page Content - In a Div?
Is putting content in a div so it doesn't muck up the look of the home page create a problem in doing well organically? Example - http://www.callawaygardens.com. We have lots of clients that want no text on the home page and we are trying to figure out how to do this while still ranking well organically. What are your thoughts? Can we get in trouble? Are there negative impacts with SEO doing it like this? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | RezStream80