Why does SEOmoz bot see duplicate pages despite I am using the canonical tag?
-
Hello here,
today SEOmoz bot found and marked as "duplicate content" the following pages on my website:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf
And I am wondering why considering the fact I am using on both those pages a canonical tag pointing to the main product page below:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html
Shouldn't SEOmoz bot follow the canonical directive and not report those two pages as duplicate?
Thank you for any insights I am probably missing here!
-
Thank you Peter, I got your ticket reply.
That makes perfect sense, and as Dr. Peter pointed out on a different thread:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-seomoz-bot-consider-these-as-duplicate-pages
I was discussing this issue further, I was confused by your report.
Thank you again for your help and I hope you will improve your report interface to avoid such confusion related issues in the future.
Best,
Fabrizio
-
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out to us, I replied to you in a support ticket, but I just wanted to share it everyone since I think it might be relevant to this discussion.
I looked into your campaign and it seems that this is happening because of where your canonical tags are pointing, you can see the duplicate pages by clicking on the number to the right side of the link. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3(Duplicate 1) is considered a duplicate of
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionVcPf.html?tab=mp3 (Duplicate 2)because the canonical tag for the first page is CANON1(http://screencast.com/t/tqvDZrLsyz8D) while the canonical for the second URL is CANON2 (http://screencast.com/t/FOguPJmK0).
Since the canonical tags point to different pages it is assumed that CANON1 and CANON2 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.Hope that helps,
Best,
Peter
SEOmoz Help Team. -
Thinking furthermore, I don't see how these pages can be considered nearly duplicate since their content is quite different:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf
Thoughts??!!
-
Nobody can tell me why SEOmoz ignore my canonical tag definitions? According to some comments on the following thread:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages
It should actually ignore pages with a canonical tag and NOT mark them as duplicate, but in my experience (as explained above), that's not been the case.
-
Ok, thank you, now I get the point... then here is my next question: is there a way to tell SEOmoz bot to ignore duplicate page with a defined canonical tag? If not, the SEOmoz duplicate page report is useless for me. I am not interested to know about duplicate page for which I have already defined a canonical tag for.
Thanks!
-
Canonical lets you pick which of the duplicates will be indexed. But Google still has to crawl the other pages when they could be crawling other parts of your site. It's an opportunity cost. If you can accept slower crawls, you can ignore the issue.
-
I am sorry, but I don't understand your point. If two pages are similar, we can use the canonical tag to "consolidate" them and avoid duplicate issues. Am I right? Or what are canonical tags for?
-
While I agree that SEOMOZ should better categorize duplicates that are canonical, the reason they still tell you it's duplicate is crawl budget. Remember, Google still has to crawl these duplicate pages and they could be crawling something else instead. Canonical only helps by letting you pick which duplicate content gets indexed. It's better to not have duplicate content than to have canonical duplicates.
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
-
Move to new domain using Canonical Tag
At the moment, I am moving from olddomain.com (niche site) to the newdomain.com (multi-niche site). Due to some reasons, I do not want to use 301 right now and planning to use the canonical pointing to the new domain instead. Would Google rank the new site instead of the old site? From what I have learnt, the canonical tag lets Google know that which is the main source of the contents. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | india-morocco0 -
Putting rel=canonical tags on blogpost pointing to product pages
I came across an article mentioning this as a strategy for getting product pages (which are tough to get links for) some link equity. See #21: content flipping: https://www.matthewbarby.com/customer-acquisition-strategies Has anyone done this? Seems like this isn't what the tag is meant for, and Google may see this as deceptive? Any thoughts? Jim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Consolidating numerous landing pages using similar search terms
Hi, The site I am working on currently uses numerous pages for search terms with similar keywords. vehicle wrapping / vehicle wraps / car wrapping / car wraps / van wrapping / van wraps etc Now obviously i want to bring these into one to help create one high authority page covering all terms. At present the "car wraps" page is ranking for quite a few of these terms. Am i best to stick with this or chose the highest search term being car wrapping, and pass the dribbles of juice from the rest and "car wraps" onto this? This is aimed at a local demographic so the local terms will be thrown in too unless you think the places pages will work in favour? Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lee4dcm0 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Canonical Tag Uses Source Title and Meta Data?
When optimising a regional same language micro site within a sub folder of a .com it dawned on me that our use of the hreflang and canonical meta elements will render individual elements such as H1 and title obsolete. As a canonical tag takes the canonical source title and meta right? It would still have value in optimising localised headings though? Appreciate any thoughts, suggestions (o:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3wh0