How do I fix apparent duplicates
-
I'm auditing a site and would appreciate your help with possible explanations and solutions as to why Google Analytics in the Content Drilldown page is showing what appears to be duplicate pages. (Refer image)
I'm wondering if I have got my head around the rel=canonical tag because the page I'd consider a duplicate "page/" has a Canonical tag pointing to "~/page.html"
This is the tag from the page Locations/
rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/Locations.html" /> so am unsure why both versions of the page are generating views. Shouldn't the Canonical tag work like a 301 redirect?
I'm unsure how the pages using the path page/ are generating so many views because I have not been able to find them and they are not indexed by Google.
Unfortunately the site is built using a Propriety CMS I'm not familiar with.
-
Hi Paul
I appreciate your explanation of when to use Canonical tags. I had previously thought they were limited to redirecting www.domain.com to domain.com.
I understand your solution to the Dupes problem and will be searching SEOMoz's resources for how to write rewrites and Search & Replace filters using RegEx in Analytics for that matter.
It's not the first time you've provided an high quality answer to a question of mine. I very much appreciate your contribution to my growing knowledge and the SEOMoz community.
Best
Nic
-
A canonical tag is fundamentally different from a 301-redirect, Nic. There's nothing about a canonical tag that stops a visitor from being able to visit that URL. A 301-redirect actually forwards the visitor to the target page as if the initial page doesn't even exist so there's no physical way for a visitor to land on it.
Put another way, the source page of a 301-redirected URL doesn't even exist as far as the search engines are concerned (and eventually the'll actually drop the original URL altogether).
The canonical tag serves a very specific purpose. When two pages must continue to be reachable by 2 different URLs but the page content is essentially identical (e.g. a product page sorted by size or colour), then a canonical tag suggests that the search engines should consolidate the ranking value in the primary URL. That's it.
In the case of the /contact+us.html and /contact+us/ pages - that page should only be reachable at one or the other URL. There's no reason or value to the user for the page to be reachable at the second address. The correct way to deal with this is to use a rewrite rule to 301-redirect all the page/ versions of the site's pages to the page.html (assuming that's what you've decided should be the canonical.
The only time to use canonical tags instead of redirects in a case like this is if it is technically impossible to implement the rewrites (a shared server that doesn't allow access to the .htaccess file for example). But this is sub-optimal and would still leave you with the same Analytics dupe page problem you're currently running into.
So what to do about the dupes in Analytics, given the site wasn't configured with the rewrites? You can write a custom Search and Replace filter for the site's profile that uses regex to merge both versions of each page into a single line. You'll absolutely want to do this in a new profile created just for this purpose though, keeping the original unfiltered profile for reference and historical data.
Note that this will only affect data collected from the date of creation of the new profile/filter. It's not retroactive. If you want to combine results for these pages for the existing data, you'll need to dump it to Excel and use a formula to combine the dupes.
Hope that all makes sense?
Paul
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
-
Moz analytics showing joomla tag feature as duplicate page content
Moz Analytics is showing Joomla 3 tag pages as Duplicate Page Content because many articles are tagged with multiple words and therefore show up on the same tag-pages. example URL: www.domain.com/tag/tagID-tagname I already added "tag" as a URL parameter with Crawl=No URLs. Is there anything else I should do?
Reporting & Analytics | | modernmagic0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content
Hi Just started use the Moz and got an analytics report today! There about 104 duplicate pages apparently, the problem is that they are not duplicates, but just the way the page has been listed with a description! The site is an Opencart and every page as got the name of the site followed by the product name for the page! How do you correct this issue?? Thank for your help
Reporting & Analytics | | DRSMPR1 -
Duplicate Title Errors on Product Category Pages - The best practice?
I'm getting quite a few 'Duplicate Title Error' on category pages which span over 2 - 3 pages. E.g. http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches?page=1 http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches?page=2 http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches?page=3 All 4 pages currently have the same title... <title>Steel Cutting Punches</title> I was thinking of adding Page Numbers to the title of each corresponding page, thus making them all unique and clearing the Duplicate Page Title errors. E.g. <title>Steel Cutting Punches</title> <title>Steel Cutting Punches | Page 1 of 3</title> <title>Steel Cutting Punches | Page 2 of 3</title> <title>Steel Cutting Punches | Page 3 of 3</title> Is this the best way to go around it? Or is there another way that I'm not thinking of? Would I need to use the rel=canonical tag to show that the original page is the one I want to be found? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | bricktech0 -
When will traffic data be working ? also whats with the spike in duplicate listing issues with everyone.
Hi There, We have no traffic data, is this something we are doing wrong or is this an issue with SEOMOZ ? Also duplicate listings have gone sky high, check goggle analytics's and all ok ? Any answers ? Thanks Charlie
Reporting & Analytics | | pro580 -
Duplicate content and ways to deal with it.
Problem I queried back a year for the portal and we can see below that the SEO juice is split between the upper and lowercase. You can see the issue in the attached images. http://i.imgur.com/OXnPp.png Solutions: 1) Quick: Change the link on the pages above to be lowercase 2) Use canonical link tag http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps The tag is part of the HTML header on a web page, the same section you'd find the Title attribute and Meta Description tag. In fact, this tag isn't new, but like nofollow, simply uses a new rel parameter. For example: http://www.darden.virginia.edu/MBA" /> ''This would tell Yahoo!, Live & Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL http://www.darden.virginia.edu/MBA and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.'' 3) See if there is any Google Analytics filters at the site level I can apply. I will check into this and get back to you. What do you all think?????? OXnPp voJdp.png OXnPp.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Darden0 -
Duplicate Url with Google shopping feed
In webmaster tool I have many duplicate url tagged as google_shopping Obviously i'm tagging the url with the goog url builder Url: elettrodomestici.yeppon.it/cura-corpo/tagliacapelli/remington-tagliacapelli-funzionamento-rete-ricaricabile-lame-in-acciaio-inox-hc5150-garanzia/ Duplicate url: elettrodomestici.yeppon.it/cura-corpo/tagliacapelli/remington-tagliacapelli-funzionamento-rete-ricaricabile-lame-in-acciaio-inox-hc5150-garanzia/?utm_source=google_shopping&utm_medium=web&utm_content=Elettrodomestici+e+Clima+%3E+Cura+del+corpo+%3E+Tagliacapelli&utm_campaign=google_shopping How can I solve it? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | yeppon0 -
Time until duplicate penalty is lifted?
Hello, I recently discovered that half of the pages on my site, about 3,500 were not being indexed or were indexing very very slow and with a heavy weight on them. I discovered the problem in the "HTML Suggestions" within Google's Webmaster Tools. An example of my main issue. All 3 of these URL were showing 200 Status OK in Google. www.getrightmusic.com/mixtape/post/ludacris_1_21_gigawatts_back_to_the_first_time www.getrightmusic.com/mixtape/post/ludacris_1_21_gigawatts_back_to_the_first_time/ www.getrightmusic.com/mixtape/ludacris_1_21_gigawatts_back_to_the_first_time I added some code to the .htaccess in order to remove the trailing slashes across the board. I also properly set up my 404 redirects, which were not properly set up by my developer (when the site "relaunched" 6 months ago 😞 ) I then added the Canonical link rel tags on the site posts/entries. I'm hoping I followed all the correct steps in fixing the issue and now, I guess, I just have to wait until the penalty gets lifted? I'm also not %100 certain that I have been penalized. I'm just assuming based on the SERP ceiling I feel and the super slow or lack of indexing my content. Any insight, help or comments would be super helpful. Thank you. Jesse
Reporting & Analytics | | getrightmusic0 -
Campaign tracking and duplicate content
Hi all, When you set up campaign tracking in Google Analytics you get something like this "?variable=value parameters" in the URL. If you place such a link on your site as an internal link, will it be considered as a different URL and will have its own link value? The question I have is, since Google knows it's a Google link and knows the original URL (by stripping the tags), does it pass link value to the original URL? If not, what can be done to pass link value? Thanks in advance. Henry
Reporting & Analytics | | hnydnn0