Why is Moz Reporting as Duplicate Page Titles?
-
Our most recent MOZ crawl campaign is reporting 931 duplicate page title errors, most of which are "Product Review" pages like the following. Although there is only one review on this page, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/Cell_Stephen_King_unabridged_compact_discs.html, MOZ is reporting 15 duplicate page title, four of which I present below.
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/name/desc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/rating/asc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/rating/desc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/state/ascWhy is MOZ reporting these "pages" as duplicate page title errors?
Are these errors hurting our SEO?
How to fix?
-
Hello Larry,
Yes this is a problem for you, and could be harming your rankings. Google has hundreds of those review pages indexed from your domain already: http://goo.gl/Ey7w4c
There are a number of ways to deal with this issue, as outlined below:
1. The quickest, easiest way to get them out of the index is to use the URL Removal Tool in Google Webmaster Tools to remove the entire /reviews/ directory from the index. Then you can place a disallow statement in your robots.txt file to block the entire /reviews/ directory from being crawled and indexed again in the future. The downside of this is that you won't get much, if any, "credit" for links pointing to those review pages. However, I doubt anyone is linking to them to begin with.
2. You could put a rel canonical tag on the review pages, which would point to the product page for which the review was left. For example, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/name/desc would have this as a rel canonical tag:
3. You could 301 redirect the review pages to the product page, as someone else suggested, but I think this would cause all sorts of unintended errors and redirects on your reviews platform. I don't recommend this route.
4. You could use a noindex,follow meta tag on the review pages.
Googlebot and Mozbot, and their respective indexes, behave differently. You're not always going to get the exact same numbers from GWT that you get from Moz.com. Use Moz.com to identify critical issues on your site, rather than expecting it to give the same broken link count, 404 error, duplicate page count, etc... as Google.
I hope this helps give you some options. Also, I recently wrote an article that I think might help you:
eCommerce Product Review SolutionsGood luck!
-
When I type in to Safari or any web browser the link
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/Cell_Stephen_King_unabridged_compact_discs.html
I get
Sucuri.net a great tool
Tells me thisScan for: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/cell_stephen_king_unabridged_compact_discs.html
Hostname: www.audiobooksonline.com
IP address: 216.38.0.121System Details:
Running on: Apache
Unable to properly scan your site. Site returning error (40x): HTTP/1.1 404 Not FoundWeb application details:
Application: ShopSite Pro 11 sp2 r5.1 (data - sd360_page_template.html)
Google Analytics installed: UA-10432774-2& shop site said this.
http://support.shopsite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9440
Hope this helps.
Thomas -
PS having capital letters in URLs is never a good idea. It can create duplicate content in the eyes of Google for Lenox user or most of us. So if you can never use capital letters in URLs and if it is an issue sometimes you will have to 301 redirect to a cleaned up URL with 100% lowercase letters
-
Hi Larry,
I think what Chris said is right on the money however it only really helps you with Google so other search engines will still see this is duplicate content fortunately that doesn't mean very much of the market is being affected however if I were you I'd rather fix it for good.
This link shows what to do and almost the exact issue you're having right now is there example
http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
& this is a link to a 301 redirect generator
http://www.htaccessredirect.com
Remember to also use a
Rel=Canonical put this tag in the correct page you want to show people.Then do a 301 redirect on the pages that are duplicates
Examples
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/name/desc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/rating/asc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/rating/desc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/state/ascPoint them so there is only one
Screaming frog spider Seo
Is an amazing tool that if you purchase it will allow you to do the redirects however you can see the issues very clearly and websites under 500 pages using the free version websites with over 500 pages in order to see all the pages you must purchase it which gives you the power to redirect and cleanup sites extremely quicklyI hope this helps,
Thomas -
Our Google Webmaster Tools reports 18 duplicate page titles. Mox crawl reported 931. ????
-
"Our page http://www.audiobooksonline.com/Cell_Stephen_King_unabridged_compact_discs.html has ONLY one review however the MOZ crawl is picking up fifteen different page addresses. Evidently the Review module is creating all these page addresses."
You may want to take a look in you Google Webmaster Tools and see which pages appear there for duplicate page titles. I think your website might have a :/sortby or /rankby feature that produces those extra pages. If that is the case you can set up "URL Parameters" field in webmaster tools that will tell Google not to count those as pages.
I hope this helps.
-
Thomas; Thank you for looking at this issue. You are correct that each page title is the same.
A PHP based "Review" module creates a form allowing folks to enter their review and then assigns a page address. We have no direct ability of assigning page titles for reviews.
Our page http://www.audiobooksonline.com/Cell_Stephen_King_unabridged_compact_discs.html has ONLY one review however the MOZ crawl is picking up fifteen different page addresses. Evidently the Review module is creating all these page addresses.
Any idea if these multiple product review pages are hurting our SERPs?
-
they are being accurate in their report
please look at your webpages source code and look at your title for every one of those links it is the same
Product Review - Cell: Stephen King - CD audiobook
Luckily a simple fix is at hand.
Use this link to take you to a great free tool which will allow you to build the title tags along with description if you feel it necessary. Description is important if you want to rank well as it needs to tell possible visitors what they can expect.
I made a example of what I would do in your situation I don't know if they're part to or not but that's how I differentiated them. Whatever information the page contains should be written out in the title tag along with the description you can also put the author and I would not waste time using keywords they are obsolete.
Your original title tag
<title>Product Review - Cell: Stephen King - CD audiobook</title>
my example
<title>Product Review part two - Cell: Stephen King - CD audiobook</title>
Was made with
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/meta-tag-generator/
I hope this is of help,
Thomas
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
-
Fluctuation in MOZ DA
HI, i want to know how MOZ DA increase or decrease. My Website: https://yesornogenerator.com/ has 8 DA according to MOZ but sometimes it goes back to 5 and then increase to 8. There is no change on backlinks so how this happens.
Moz Pro | | TOFHA0545150 -
I am having a duplicate title -pagination issue Need Help
In WordPress I added %%page%% saved changes and ran a test in Moz and screaming frog, it doesn't show any duplicates. But when I open the site up in a new browser the duplicate titles are still there. No access to the PHP file due to the theme the client chose also. Any suggestions anyone?
Moz Pro | | Strateguyz0 -
50,000 4xx errors listed in MOZ report :(
HI, I've just had a look at a customers MOZ report and discovered nearly 50,000 errors listed!! The site is a non dynamic, non database driven site so where these have come from is beyond me. Example - (Both links open in a new window)
Moz Pro | | Skips
LIVE PAGE - http://lunnonwaste.com/licenses/Heatherland-Limited-H&S-Policy-Document-JAN-15.pdf
NON EXISTANT PAGE - http://lunnonwaste.com/licenses/licenses/Heatherland-Limited-H&S-Policy-Document-JAN-15.pdf - if you hover over any links you'll see they're ALL ......./licenses/licenses/.......... which doesn't exist! It's the file system that seems to be the problem - .........../licenses/licenses/........... and this gets added onto (............./licenses/licenses/licenses/licenses/.............. , up to the 50,000 page errors LOL The problem is self replicating. It's very odd and not something I've ever seen before, NON of these 'extra' pages are listed on the server, so where are they coming from? Any suggestions or help would be gratefully appreciated1 -
On Page Report - To Much Alt. Text Keyword Usage
I ran a Moz on page report for our Roho Cushions page using the keyword Roho Cushions. I found "keyword stuffing" within the page, mainly from alternate text on images. The report told me I have 45 IMG ALT keywords & 28 Body Keywords. I cannot find the keywords I've used in the body, and if I inspect any image element, the keyword is not used as alternate text. I've ran this report multiple times in the past 2 weeks and have come up with the same results. Does anyone have any solutions? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Mike.Bean0 -
Where are my SEO Moz resources
I logged in, changed my password and now I can't find my SEO resources. I need to pull a report quickly, and can't find what I need. Please help ASAP!
Moz Pro | | bcbsm0 -
Rank Report Not Updating
The ranking tool indicates that a new rank report will be generated every Tuesday. My last report was on November 15th. It is now November 25th. It missed last week. Should I report something wrong or is this normal? How do I keep it updating on a weekly basis like it's supposed to? I checked in settings to see if I had done anything wrong and couldn't find anything. Regards, Dino
Moz Pro | | Dino640 -
SEO MOZ Timezone
I have looked & looked but I can not figure out how to set MY timezone on SEOMOZ? The dates are all wrong in my reports ... **Organic traffic data ** Last Data Update: 04/16/2012 Crawl Diagnostics Last Crawl Completed: Apr. 20th, 2012 Next Crawl Starts: Apr. 25th, 2012 Keyword Rankings "Your keywords are updated weekly on Saturday. The last update was April 19th, 2012." Yet today is Friday the 20th 2012??? It seems like each segment of the information is updated on a differing date?
Moz Pro | | Mcarle0