Fixed "lower-case/mixed-case" Internal Links causing duplicate- Now What?
-
Hi,
So after a site re-launch, Moz crawled it and reported over 150 duplicate content errors. It was determined that it was because of incorrect uses of capitalization in internal links. Using screaming frog, I found all (500+) internal links and fixed them to match the actual URL. Now the site is100% consistent across the board as best I can tell.
I am unsure what to do next though. We launched the site with all the internal link errors, and now many of the pages that are indexed and ranked are with the incorrect URL form. Some have said to use a canonical tag. But how can I use a canonical tag on a page doesn't even exist? Same thing with 301. Can I redirect /examplepage to /ExamplePage if only /ExamplePage actually exists?
I would really appreciate some advice on what to do. After I fixed the internal links, I waited a week and Moz crawled the site again and reported all the same errors, and then even more. All capitalization. Seems like it's a mess. After I did another Screaming Frog crawl, it showed no duplicates, so I know I was successful in fixing the internals.
Help!!
-
Thanks, this helps!
-
Just to add, you don't need a page to physically exist to add a 301 redirect Kristin, so you can set the redirects from these old pages fine.
-
My advice would be:
- Resubmit key pages to index through WMT (Google & Bing)
- Make sure your Sitemaps are up to date with the proper page URLs, and submitted to WMT
- Set up the 301s if you have the time. You can create redirections using your .htaccess file, as long as you have an Apache-based site. This page is a great guide to writing .htaccess commands, including 301s and others
I had a similar problem with a slightly different manifestation, related to trailing slashes on my URLs. It was hard, but after doing the first two steps and setting up redirects, it was just a question of waiting for Google and MOZ to catch-up. Redirects took care of bad SERP links, and at this point (just over 2-weeks after launch with bad links), everything has been updated with the correct page URLs. Good luck!
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 Homepage - How to fix?
Hi Everyone, I've tried using BeamUsUp SEO Crawler and have found one warning and two errors on our site. The warning is for a duplicate meta description, and the errors are a duplicate page and a duplicate title. For each problem it's showing the same two pages as the source of the error, but one has a slash at the end and one doesn't. They're both for the homepage. https://www.url.com/ And https://www.url.com Has anyone seen this before? Does anyone know if this is anything we should worry about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rswhtn1 -
Rel=canonical and internal links
Hi Mozzers, I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question: How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A? I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not. I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk0 -
Internal links to preferential pages
Hi all, I have question about internal linking and canonical tags. I'm working on an ecommerce website which has migrated platform (shopify to magento) and the website design has been updated to a whole new look. Due to the switch to magento, the developers have managed to change the internal linking structure to product pages. The old set up was that category pages (on urls domain.com/collections/brand-name) for each brand would link to products via the following url format: domain.com/products/product-name . This product url was the preferential version that duplicate product pages generated by shopify would have their canonical tags pointing to. This set up was working fine. Now what's happened is that the category pages have been changed to link to products via dynamically generated urls based on the user journey. So products are now linked to via the following urls: domain.com/collection/brand-name/product-name . These new product pages have canonical tags pointing back to the original preferential urls (domain.com/products/product-name). But this means that the preferential URLs for products are now NOT linked to anywhere on the website apart from within canonical tags and within the website's sitemap. I'm correct in thinking that this definitely isn't a good thing, right? I've actually noticed Google starting to index the non-preferential versions of the product pages in addition to the preferential versions, so it looks like Google perhaps is ignoring the canonical tags as there are so many internal links pointing to non-preferential pages, and no on-site links to the actual preferential pages? I've recommended to the developers that they change this back to how it was, where the preferential product pages (domain.com/products/product-name) were linked to from collection pages. I just would like clarification from the Moz community that this is the right call to make? Since the migration to the new website & platform we've seen a decrease in search traffic, despite all redirects being set up. So I feel that technical issues like this can't be doing the website any favours at all. If anyone could help out and let me know if what I suggested is correct then that would be excellent. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Guy_OTS0 -
Duplicate content across internation urls
We have a large site with 1,000+ pages of content to launch in the UK. Much of this content is already being used on a .nz url which is going to stay. Do you see this as an issue or do you thin Google will take localised factoring into consideration. We could add a link from the NZ pages to the UK. We cant noindex the pages as this is not an option. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide0 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0 -
First Link Priority question - image/logo in header links to homepage
I have not found a clear answer to this particular aspect of the "first link priority" discussion, so wanted to ask here. Noble Samurai (makers of Market Samurai seo software) just posted a video discussing this topic and referencing specifically a use case example where when you disable all the css and view the page the way google sees it, many times companies use an image/logo in their header which links to their homepage. In my case, if you visit our site you can see the logo linking back to the homepage, which is present on every page within the site. When you disable the styling and view the site in a linear path, the logo is the first link. I'd love for our first link to our homepage include a primary keyword phrase anchor text. Noble Samurai (presumably seo experts) posted a video explaining this specifically http://www.noblesamurai.com/blog/market-samurai/website-optimization-first-link-priority-2306 and their suggested code implementations to "fix" it http://www.noblesamurai.com/first-link-priority-templates which use CSS and/or javascript to alter the way it is presented to the spiders. My web developer referred me to google's webmaster central: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353 where they seem to indicate that this would be attempting to hide text / links. Is this a good or bad thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dcutt0