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
-
Duplicate Site Content found in Moz; Have a URL Parameter set in Google Webmaster Tools
Hey, So on our site we have a Buyer's Guide that we made. Essentially it is a pop-up with a series of questions that then recommends a product. The parameter ?openguide=true can be used on any url on our site to pull this buyer's guide up. Somehow the Moz Site Crawl reported each one of our pages as duplicate content as it added this string (?openguide=true) to each page. We already have a URL Parameter set in Google Webmaster Tools as openguide ; however, I am now worried that google might be seeing this duplicate content as well. I have checked all of the pages with duplicate title tags in the Webmaster Tools to see if that could give me an answer as to whether it is detecting duplicate content. I did not find any duplicate title tag pages that were because of the openguide parameter. I am just wondering if anyone knows:
Moz Pro | | MitchellChapman
1. a way to check if google is seeing it as duplicate content
2. make sure that the parameter is set correctly in webmaster tools
3. or a better way to prevent the crawler from thinking this is duplicate content Any help is appreciated! Thanks, Mitchell Chapman
www.kontrolfreek.com0 -
Duplicate content nightmare
Hey Moz Community I ran a crawl test, and there is a lot of duplicate content but I cannot work out why. It seems that when I publish a post secondary urls are being created depending on some tags and categories. Or at least, that is what it looks like. I don't know why this is happening, nor do I know if I need to do anything about it. Help? Please.
Moz Pro | | MobileDay0 -
New to Moz and wanted a bit of help with my report
Hi, I have used the MOZ report to analyse one of my friends sites and I wanted to query a few warnings it highlighted and I just wanted people's thought on how important they thought these were: The first is dupliate descriptions/titles. This is mainly down the e-commerce pages. Fist duplicate content:
Moz Pro | | dannylancs
On some pages the description is identical and all that is different is the title and picture, is this an issue? Duplicate pages:
Due to the way the website folder structure/catergories has been created some pages are identical but because the product comes under 2 cetergories there is 2 seperate pages, should we use the canonical on one of the pages? Also regarding the canonical tag, they have put link rel="canonical" on every page and got it to point at itself, so not really being used in the way it is meant to be. Could something like this cause any harm? The final thing is internal linking back to the homepage. If for example the homepage is http://www.test.com, when linking back is it best to put the full URL over "index.html" even though they are the same page? Any help really appreciated Dan0 -
Will moz crawl pages blocked by robots.txt and nofollow links?
i have over 2,000 temporary redirects in my campaign report redirects are mostly events like being redirected to a login page before showing the actual data im thinking of adding nofollow on the link so moz wont crawl the redirection to reduce the notification will this solve my problem?
Moz Pro | | WizardOfMoz0 -
Moz is incorrect
So i have had my latest crawl, and the keyword report is showing that using google.co.uk i have some keywords not within the top 50 - i have just done a spot check (coping & pasting) direct from Moz to google.co.uk and out of 4 i have checked 1 keyword i am number 4 and 1 keyword i am page 3 - therefore within the top 50. This leads me to believe that there is something wrong with Moz - here is 1 example "land in the cayman islands" i am showing in moz as not in the top 50 when i am showing on Google as number.4
Moz Pro | | OasisLandDevelopment0 -
OnPage report check
Is anyone else having issues with onpage report card on SEOmoz: I keep getting this message: The change you wanted was rejected. Maybe you tried to change something you didn't have access to.
Moz Pro | | deaddogdesign0 -
Domain and Page authority dropped on home page
My two strongest links did not show up in the latest Open Site Explorer run. Business.com and BOTW.com...Linking domains went from 21 to 15. Domain dropped 3 pts and Page authority dropped 3 pts I believe. Is there a function in SEOmoz.org that lets you track your domain scores over time? Thanks, Boo
Moz Pro | | Boodreaux0 -
Using the On-Page optimization Report Card
I am curious if there is a way to get the on page optimization report card to not show a grade of "F" for a page that I'm not targeting a particular keyword for? For example my home page has a lot of grade "F's" for keywords that are targeted on different pages.
Moz Pro | | kadesmith0