WMT Showing Duplicate Meta Description Issues Altough Posts Were Redirected
-
Dear Moz Community,
Some time ago we've change the structure of our website and we've redirected the old URL's to the new ones. About 2,000 posts were redirected at that time.
While checking Webmaster Tools a few days ago I've discovered that about 500 duplicate meta-description issues appear in the "HTML Improvements" area. To my surprise, altough the old posts were redirected to the new path, WMT sees the description of the old posts similar with the one of the new post. Moreover, after changing the structure all meta-descriptions were modified and they weren't the same used before the restructure.
For example I've redirected /blog/taxi-transfer-from-merton-sw19-to-london-city-airport/ to /destinations/greater-london/merton-sw19/taxi-transfer-to-london-city-airport-from-merton/
Now they are shown as having duplicate content. I've checked the redirects and they are working.
I get the same error from the redirected pages for about 150 titles.
Did anyone else get this errors or can you please offer me some suggestions about how I can fix this?
Thank you in advance!
Tiberiu
-
Yes - assuming this is the final/good page, you have it canonical link to itself.
See #5 on this post by DP
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
-
Dear CleverPHD,
Thank you for your answer. Your advice sounds pretty good but let me see if I got your suggestion clearly. So, from what I understand, you are saying that for the page www.example.com**/blog/taxi-transfer-from-merton-sw19-to-london-city-airport/ **I should add the following as the rel canonical?
Thank you once again!
Best regards,
Tiberiu
-
I have seen this exact issue before in GWT on a site I work with. It is annoying, but does look to happen on larger sites. Here is what we did to fix our issue. This assumes you already have the proper 301 redirects in place.
-
Add the canonical link to self on all the new pages
-
Wait for Google bot to spider them
-
Wait for GWT to update the status in the report
It is not a quick fix as it takes a while for steps 2 & 3 to cycle though as not all pages are spidered at the same rate. it may take you several months to see it all work itself out.
On this same site, I now also see if I have a new post that I then change the URL and add a 301 that GWT goes through this same process. Again, it is really annoying as I have the 301 in place, I have sent a clear directive to Google that the new page is replacing the old and they show the duplicate error for the old and new URLs in GWT.
I cannot see any logic in why this happens and why the report shows the way that it does. My best guess is that GWT is doing some batch processing and the sequence is off on what is looked at when and so this is a side effect of that process. It is like the spider first sees the new and old URLs from the 301 and logs both URLs. What should happen next is the next batch process should account for the 301 redirects and take out the old URLs, instead the process to check duplicate titles and descriptions runs and generates the duplicate report before the 301 cleanup process can get to it. Disclaimer, I am not a developer etc, but just trying to guess at the logic of "why".
If anyone else has any insight on why this happens, I would love to hear it. I have been able to "fix" the issue using the steps above, but it was in reality not broken to start with. It works out as one of the Moz rx is to use self canonicalizing links to help with scrapers, parameters etc. I just wish GWT was more useful in this sense as I have to sort out all the "errors" to get to the real issues. I end up having to use the Moz crawl or Screaming Frog etc to get at this information.
-
-
Tiberiu,
So google WMT is giving these errors? I've had this in the past with a site of a client. Issues were long solved and still Google WMT gives these errors. What does moz.com campaign say? Do the same errors occur here? It could well be a glitch of bug in Google WMT.
Regards
Jarno
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
-
Including FAQ as Invividual Blog Posts Without Duplicate Issues
My website's FAQ section has a lot of detailed answers, of which I want to upload most on an individual basis to my blog. Example: I may have 30 FAQ and I want to upload 28 of these FAQ as individual blog posts, as it could be good additional search traffic. Question: how do I deal with duplicate content issues? Do I Include canonical? The FAQ are all on the same URL - not separate URL's - which means each blog post would only represent a small % of the entire FAQ section, though each blog would be a 100% copy of an FAQ.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi51 -
Not alt tags but Title and description Meta: My designer's answer.
Hello! I was busy doing lots of key wording for my images which I hate and notices that when viewed in source code, the different places I inputed information translated into Title and Description meta tags but NO alt tags. As I'm a a photographer, it's really important to me that I make the most of my images to get increased traffic so I challenged the people behind my website about it. This is their response to the question: "We all know how important the alt tags are for image SEO so why does
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid
the design allows Title, Description and Keyword image tags but not alt
tags?" Unfortunately, there is no way to add an alt tag and title tag specifically to an image display page. However, as you have pointed out here, we use other elements that essentially accomplish the same thing. Each image display page does have its own page title and meta description, as you have also noticed. For the title, we use the IPTC Headline field (if there is no headline, then we use IPTC Title, and if there is no title, then we go to file name), and for the meta description, we use both the IPTC caption as well as the keywords - so all of that information is embedded on the image display page with the image itself and search engines can index this content. Alt Text data intends to given contextual information to search engines when they crawl your site, and the IPTC metadata that shows along with your images, does this as well." What is your opinion on that answer?0 -
301 Redirection problems
A couple of days ago we did a restructure of our e-commerce site (wordpress + woocomerce) where some product categories needed to change names. I used Yoast SEO plugin to do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file.Today I noticed that we had two hits in the SERP on the phrase "dildos med vibrator". See the attached screenshot (first two results).One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibrator/ which is the right URL. One goes to http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildosdildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ which is a corrupt URL that has never been in use. The old one we did a redirect from was /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/The command in the .htaccess file was: Redirect 301 /kategori/for-honom/dildos-for-honom/dildos-med-vibrator-dildos-for-honom/ http://www.oliverocheva.se/kategori/sexleksaker/dildos/dildos-med-vibratorWhat has happened here? Why does the 301 create entirely new URL:s in the SERP?Tz0TULT.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
Worpress Redirect
I am migrating a WP site from one domain to another for a client. WP is installed at the root. Typically I would simply issue a 301-redirect for the entire domain, however, in this case, the client wants the content in 2 specific subfolders to remain live on the old site and have everything else redirected. Example: olddomain.com/subfolder-1/ olddomain.com/subfolder-2/ Question: what would the the htaccess code look like to pull this off? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Duplicate Content and Titles
Hi Mozzers, I saw a considerable amount of duplicate content and page titles on our clients website. We are just implementing a fix in the CMS to make sure that these are all fixed. What changes do you think I could see in terms of rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Duplicate content
I run about 10 sites and most of them seemed to fall foul of the penguin update and even though I have never sought inorganic links I have been frantically searching for a link based answer since April. However since asking a question here I have been pointed in another direction by one of your contributors. It seems At least 6 of my sites have duplicate content issues. If you search Google for "We have selected nearly 200 pictures of short haircuts and hair styles in 16 galleries" which is the first bit of text from the site short-hairstyles.com about 30000 results appear. I don't know where they're from nor why anyone would want to do this. I presume its automated since there is so much of it. I have decided to redo the content. So I guess (hope) at some point in the future the duplicate nature will be flushed from Google's index? But how do I prevent it happening again? It's impractical to redo the content every month or so. For example if you search for "This facility is written in Flash® to use it you need to have Flash® installed." from another of my sites that I coincidently uploaded a new page to a couple of days ago, only the duplicate content shows up not my original site. So whoever is doing this is finding new stuff on my site and getting it indexed on google before even google sees it on my site! Thanks, Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
Duplicate content issue for franchising business
Hi All We are in the process of adding a franchise model to our exisitng stand alone business and as part of the package given to the franchisee will be a website with conent identical to our existing website apart from some minor details such as contact and address details. This creates a huge duplicate content issue and even if we implement a cannonical approach to this will still be unfair to the franchisee in terms of their markeitng and own SEO efforts. The url for each franchise will be unique but the content will be the same to a large extend. The nature of the service we offer (professional qualificaitons) is such that the "products" can only be described in a certain way and it will be near on in impossible to have a unique set of "product" pages for each franchisee. I hope that some of you have come across a similar problem or that some of you have suggestions or ideas for us to get round this. Kind regards Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterpete0 -
How to Redirect
What is the htaccess code to redirect everything in a directory to a file? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0