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
-
Ugly Redirect Chain
Hey everyone, Hoping to get your take on this: We have some very high demand products, they usually sell out in minutes (lucky us, eh?!) We are implementing a queue function on a product page - basically if too many people try to check out at the same time, we dump them in a queue The queue could kick in before or after search engines have indexed the product page The product page has markup and on-page content relating to the product. The queue page exists on an external (yes, external) site The queue page will not have any of the product info, markup, or optimised page title Product page will 302 to queue page and starts a series of 302 redirects! Here's the sequence when queue is active: CANONICAL product page (with markup, on-page product info, optimised page title, etc.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TSEOTEAM
>> 302 >> queue page on external domain (ZERO markup, product info or page title)
>>302>> same queue page, but throwing a hashed queue ID into the URL (basically giving you your place in the queue)
HELD IN QUEUE FOR A FEW MINUTES
**>> 302> ** NON-CANONICAL product page (with markup, on-page product info, optimised page title, etc.) I can foresee two scenarios search engine has indexed product page prior to queue kicking in. Then queue kicks in 302ing search engine to queue page. because it's a 302 the crappy queue page content is indexed back to the originating product page. This causes search engines to drop the product page cos all the product-specific markup/content has been overwritten with crappy queue page content search engines don't manage to index product page before queue kicks in. They crawl product page URL, get 302 to queue page, index crappy queue page content and think the product page is crappy, so don't traffic it. They will recrawl the product page once the queue's turned off, only to discover the product has sold out - boo. I very much doubt the search engines will 'wait for a few minutes' so may never end up reaching the product page again. I'm trying to get the markup/product info and optimised meta data injected into the queue page, so that remains present at all points on the journey in the hope that this enables search engines to continue to rank and traffic the product page. What's your take on this? Any suggestions on how we might overcome the issues? (before you ask; avoiding using the queue system is impossible, sorry!) Thanks!1 -
What's the best redirect to use for a newer version of a blog post?
For example: suppose you have a post "The Best Games to Play for YouTube Gamers in 2016" and you want to make this a yearly series. Should you 301 the 2016 version to the new 2017 one? Should you use the canonical attribute? If 2016 isn't in the URL, should you make the 2017 one the new URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edward_Sturm0 -
Has anyone ever seen Google truncating the beginning of a meta description on a mobile device?
I could not find any articles or mentions of this online, and I am wondering if it has to do with the website being an "m-dot" website and not responsive. Any thoughts would be appreciated! IaZJWB2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Translated version of meta description showing in SERPs
Hi all, When a search for our brand is done, the homepage is shown but the meta description is in French. We have a translated version of the site available once the user is on the site, but there's no reason it should be displaying the translated version in the SERPs. This issue has never happened before and began last week. Anyone seen anything similar? https://www.google.com/search?q=revolve+clothing Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Rel canonical or redirect
Hi, my client has the following links pointing to the home page http://www.weddingrings.com/index.cfm http://www.weddingrings.com In this case would I use rel canonical or redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Product descriptions & Duplicate Content: between fears and reality
Hello everybody, I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc). What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site... what do you think? Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ? Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Blog posts not showing in serps for exact match title search
hi- my first client ranks #1 for the exact phrase of each blog post title the 2nd client doesnt rank anywhere when i search for the exact post title 2nd client has robots.txt User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro9
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ so that shouldnt noindex any posts right? his site ranks for many kw's - but oddly none of his blog posts are anywhere to be found - i dont mean for a kw search - i mean for searching for the entire title he doesnt rank anywhere in first 5 pages for any of 6-7 posts i checked any idea what could cause this? thanks0