Duplicate Page Titles & Content
-
We have just launched a new version of a website and after running it through SEOMOZ we have over 6000 duplicate title & content errors. (awesome)
We have products that show up multiple times under different URLs however we "thought" we had implemented the rel=canonical correctly.
My question is - do these errors still show up in SEOMOZ despite the canonical tags being there OR if they were "correct" would we be getting "zero" errors?
-
Hi Ladies & Gents
It was a canonical tag error - we went from 6000 errors to 11500 errors and now after the issue was fixed we have a handful of non related errors to sort.
Really appreciate all the feedback.
Kind Regards
Liam
-
how are you getting on, did this get resolved?
-
Hey Peter, I'm just having problems with the 4th example, and I believe you are doing it wrong. Not to try to point out problems with your software, but the report that I now have is more or less unusable for my clients because you see the duplicates this way.
What we have, is duplicates reaching to different categories with canonical set up.
B references A in category 1
D references C in category 2
and hundreds more ...But, because B and D are empty, except for the navigation, the tool sees B and D as duplicates. Two problems with that:
1. They are not even "considered" by Google, because they reference something else as a canonical, so they are not duplicates of each other.
2. The report now shows 10 different pages from different categories as duplicates, and with the number of false identified duplicates it is now impossible for me to find any real duplicates.So, is my understanding wrong, and what can we do to find the really duplicated pages?
Thanks,
-
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out to us! I'm sorry if there are any confusions regarding the way we classify duplicate content. Just clarify a few things, 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.For more information on using canonical tags, check out this great post by our very own Dr. Pete:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsI hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Best,
Peter
SEOmoz Help Team. -
Thanks for the responses - sort of what I feared but haven't implemented canonical tags before so was unsure whether they should be showing.
Looks like there is a long day ahead
-
I am afraid i don’t know the detailed ins and outs of SEOMozs products, however we have some paginated pages on one of our sites. Our crawl reports are not showing errors for duplicate page titles and they are detailed in the notices section as canonical.
This implies to me that the crawl reports do ignore correctly formatted canonical tags. Perhaps you could download the error list and the list of discovered canonical tags and compare the two to confirm. Alternately try crawling the site with other tools, the one i would recommend is Screaming Frog as this will allow you to filter canonical tags in the reports, and do it for free.
-
Hi,
All things being equal, if the canonical tags are properly implemented you should see zero.
For ecomm sites, it is pretty easy to get duplicate title and content warnings from similar but not identical product pages which is usually an indication of thin content (no descriptions or one line descriptions that are almost identical).
So first line of enquiry is to confirm the canonicals are really doing what you expect them to be doing and if after the next crawl you still see duplicate issues then download them in a csv and start investigating them to see which pages are being flagged.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Source page showsI have 2 h1 tags on my page. I can only find one.
When I grade my page it says I have more than one h1 tag. I view the source page and it shows there are two h1 headings with the same wording. If I delete the one h1 heading I can find, the page source shows I have deleted both of them. I don't know how to get to the other heading to delete it. And I'm off page one of google! Can anybody help? Clay Stephens
Moz Pro | | Coot0 -
Is one page with long content better than multiple pages with shorter content?
(Note, the site links are from a sandbox site and has very low DA or PA) If you look at this page, you will see at the bottom a lengthy article detailing all of the properties of the product categories in the links above. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-s/432.htm My question is, is there more SEO value in having the one long article in the general product category page, or in breaking up the content and moving the sub-topics as content to the more specific sub-category pages? e.g. http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Button-Head-Socket-s/1579.htm
Moz Pro | | AspenFasteners
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Cap-Screws-s/331.htm
http://www.aspensecurityfasteners.com/Screws-Captive-Panel-Scre-s/1559.htm0 -
New pages on my web site
I have created web sites that appear somewhere on Google in hardly any time at all, but I appear to have forgotten something or things are different for pages added recently to an existing website. I have added a page on a particular subject, optimized it using on page grader, so that I get an A, and a check mark for everything except H1 tags and rel=canonical which my web hosting provider does not support. I do have a check mark for accessible to search engines The page has the format http://www.domain.com/specific-keyword It is in the menu, so should have internal links to it, as I understand it. I have created a new site map, and submitted it in webmaster tools. Interestingly it says that of the 96 pages only 76 were indexed is this a clue? and why would they not index a page I have then shared the page on google plus, facebook, tumblr, pinterest and twitter and some others In OSE it comes up as domain authority 28 page authority 1, the social media shares do show up in metrics on the right but no links internal or external are shown, they do on other pages I created in the same way. Is it just a case of waiting or is their something I do to help thank you
Moz Pro | | singingtelegramsuk0 -
Duplicate content error?
I am getting a duplicate content error for the following pages: http://www.bluelinkerp.com/products/accounting/index.asp http://www.bluelinkerp.com/products/accounting/ But, of course, the 2nd link is just an automatic redirect to the index file, is it not? Why is it thinking it is a different URL? See image. NJfxA.png
Moz Pro | | BlueLinkERP0 -
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:
Moz Pro | | yacpro13
/safety-lights.html Duplicate 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=514 What I don't understand, is all of the URLS with URL parameters have a rel canonical tag pointing to the 'real' URL
/safety-lights.html So why is SEOMoz crawler still flagging this as duplicate content?0 -
Page Authority Bulk Check?
Hi all, Was wondering if maybe using the SEOmoz API there was a way to check in excel the page authority of 500 URLs or more? Or is there a different way to do this? Thanks, Carlos
Moz Pro | | Carlos-R0 -
Duplicate Content being caused by home page?
Hello everyone, I am new to SEOmoz and SEO in general and I have a quick questions. When running a SEO Web Crawler report on my URL, I noticed in the report that my home page (also known as my index page) was listed twice. Here is what the report was showing: www.example.com/ www.example.com/index.php So are these 2 different urls? If so, is this considered duplicate content and should I block crawler access to the index.php? Thanks in advance for the help!
Moz Pro | | threebiz0 -
Duplicate page titles are the same URL listed twice
The system says I have two duplicate page titles. The page titles are exactly the same because the two URLs are exactly the same. These same two identical URLs show up in the Duplicate Page Content also - because they are the same. We also have a blog and there are two tag pags showing identical content - I have blocked the blog in robots.txt now, because the blog is only for writers. I suppose I could have just blocked the tags pages.
Moz Pro | | loopyal0