Duplicate Content & Canonicals
-
I am a bit confused about canonicals and whether they are "working" properly on my site. In Webmaster Tools, I'm showing about 13,000 pages flagged for duplicate content, but nearly all of them are showing two pages, one URL as the root and a second with parameters. Case in point, these two are showing as duplicate content:
http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night
We have a canonical tag on each of the pages pointing to the one without the parameters. Pages with other parameters don't show as duplicates, just one root and one dupe per listing,
So, am I not using the canonical tag properly? It is clearly listed as:Is the tag perhaps not formatted properly (I saw someone somewhere state that there needs to be a /> after the URL, but that seems rather picky for Google)?Suggestions?
-
Thanks, Dr. Pete.
I'll discuss the options with our dev team and see which one will cause the least amount of developer caffeine consumption.
-
Argh... sorry, I didn't even check/see that. Yeah, that may be a real problem - you're basically sending two canonicalization signals that are in conflict. Is there any way to hide the defaults? If the canonicals point to (A), but then (A) redirects to (B), Google may just ignore the canonical.
Unfortunately, your options are to either: (1) hope for the best, (2) canonical to the uglier URL, or (3) kill the redirect and set the default parameters on the server-side (without resetting the URL).
I am primarily seeing the canonical URL in Google's index, so I'm not sure it's actually causing you harm. It's just not an ideal situation.
-
Dr. Pete:
I'm looking into it to be sure, but I believe that you are correct in that this is an ad-tracking URL.
A follow up question:
The URL that is the canonical version of each page would be in the format of
http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night
However, this exact URL redirects to one with default parameters for substrate, style and frame size:
Should we change our canonical from the first URL (without the parameters) to the second URL with the parameters? Or is that a moot point with Google?
-
While the properly closed tag should have "... />", that's generally only an issue in very isolated cases. I've never seen it interfere with a canonical tag. It's a harmless change to make (and it is more correct), but my gut reaction is that this will make no difference. Google should be honoring these canonicals.
One odd thing I'm seeing. If I dig into the index, I'm finding the following page:
This may be an ad-tracking URL (?) and it's redirecting somehow (but not with a 301 or 302) to the non-canonical URL. This may be sending a mixed signal, and ideally it would redirect to the canonical version of the URL. I'm not sure where this version is coming from, so it's a bit hard to diagnose.
-
Hi Darin
The tag is not working because if you go into Google and enter the URL: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night?substrate_id=3&product_style_id=8&frame_id=63&size=25x20 you will see that it is being indexed on Google.
If it's being indexed, then it runs the risk of duplicate content issues.
The tag definitely does need the /> at the end, so the correct usage of the tag would be: rel="canonical" href="http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night" />
I think if you implement that small change, there shouldn't be any problems.
Hope this 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
-
Will Google Judge Duplicate Content on Responsive Pages to be Keyword Spamming?
I have a website for my small business, and hope to improve the search results position for 5 landing pages. I recently modified my website to make it responsive (mobile friendly). I was not able to use Bootstrap; the layout of the pages is a bit unusual and doesn't lend itself to the options Bootstrap provides. Each landing page has 3 main div's - one for desktop, one for tablet, one for phone.
Web Design | | CurtisB
The text content displayed in each div is the same. Only one of the 3 div’s is visible; the user’s screen width determines which div is visible. When I wrote the HTML for the page, I didn't want each div to have identical text. I worried that
when Google indexed the page it would see the same text 3 times, and would conclude that keyword spamming was occurring. So I put the text in just one div. And when the page loads jQuery copies the text from the first div to the other two div's. But now I've learned that when Google indexes a page it looks at both the page that is served AND the page that is rendered. And in my case the page that is rendered - after it loads and the jQuery code is executed – contains duplicate text content in three div's. So perhaps my approach - having the served page contain just one div with text content – fails to help, because Google examines the rendered page, which has duplicate text content in three div's. Here is the layout of one landing page, as served by the server. 1000 words of text goes here. No text. jQuery will copy the text from div id="desktop" into here. No text. jQuery will copy the text from div id="desktop" into here. ===================================================================================== My question is: Will Google conclude that keyword spamming is occurring because of the duplicate content the rendered page contains, or will it realize that only one of the div's is visible at a time, and the duplicate content is there only to achieve a responsive design? Thank you!0 -
Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content
I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution. Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container Happens while on the company network, as well as externally Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps Codebase is .net Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it. I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz Linking to an image example below knEUzqd
Web Design | | CliqStudios0 -
How to avoid duplicate title tags?
I've got roughly 1200 location pages for a travel client. Since the business does the same thing at every location, the title tags and descriptions are almost identical except for the location name. I know Google likes tags and meta descriptions to be unique, but how many different ways can I write the same title in a 55 character limit? For example, here's how the titles look: Things to do in San Jose, CA | Company Name
Web Design | | Masbro
Things to do in Dallas, TX | Company Name
Things to do in Albuquerque, NM | Company Name **My question: Are 1200 title tags structured this way unique enough for Google? ** I have got the same problem with the meta descriptions, but I can vary those a bit more because i have more characters to work with. Thanks for your input,
Dino2 -
How to handle International Duplicated Content?
Hi, We have multiple international E-Commerce websites. Usually our content is translated and doesn't interfere with each other, but how do search engines react to duplicate content on different TLDs? We have copied our Dutch (NL) store for Belgium (BE) and i'm wondering if we could be inflicting damage onto ourselves... Should I use: for every page? are there other options so we can be sure that our websites aren't conflicting? Are they conflicting at all? Alex
Web Design | | WebmasterAlex0 -
ECWID How to fix Duplicate page content and external link issue
I am working on a site that has a HUGE number of duplicate pages due to ECWID ecommerce platform. The site is built with Joomla! How can I rectify this situation? The pages also show up as "external " links on crawls... Is it the ECWID platform? I have never worked on a site that uses this. Here is an example of a page with the issue (there are 6280 issues) URL: http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spare-parts?Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560081
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Using content from other sites without duplicate content penalties?
Hi there, I am setting up a website, where i believe it would substantially benefit users experience if i setup a database of information on artists. I am torn because to feasibly do this correctly, i would have content that is built from multiple sources, but has no real unique content. It would have parts from Wikipedia, parts from other websites etc. All would be sourced of-course. My concern is that if i do this, am i risking in devaluing my website because of this. Is there a way i can handle this without taking a hit?
Web Design | | BorisD0 -
Content Stacking - CSS positioning
I was curious to know what everyone thinks about CSS positioning so that the spiders will read a optimal bulk of content first - before it reads the others. Say I have some Tab's set up for navigational purposes, where the content in the last tab is actually what I want the bots to see first. What would be the best practices for accomplishing something like this?
Web Design | | imageworks-2612900 -
Need advice on diplaying content for Search
Hi every body, I am doing landing page redesign(s). Does any body know or can refer a content carousel that can rotate video and pictures? The "site with images" search option result is a compelling reason to showcase pictures if your space competeiveness (showroom, merchandise, etc) can be improved with a strong image presence. here is my main landing page http://www.shearerpainting.com I know there is alot of stuff, and confusing call to action, but I am looking for strategies to clean it up, clear fous on action (get bid, learn more), but allow users to see that they can dig for more content.
Web Design | | johnshearer0