How come canonicalized pages are showing in the Duplicate Titles report?
-
I am currently removing all duplicate titles from my site via title tag changes, 301's, and in some instances, canonical tags.
I'm confused about why the Moz report spit out pages with duplicate titles that are canonicalized to other pages. Does Google actually consider these pages as having duplicate titles? Or is Roger Mozbot not intuitive enough to to disregard those pages?
-
Just jumping in here even though it's an old question.
The thing is, Moz is crawling the pages and showing duplicate titles, but if you have page B using rel=caonical pointing to page A, then Google will reference page A.
It's ok if page A and page B have the same title if using rel=canonical, because Google will follow that directive most of the time.
So if Moz is surfacing duplicate title tags but they are canonicalizing, it's safe to ignore Moz's flagged issue. Don't always take it at face value.
It would most likely be a waste of time to go change all the page titles for the duplicate pages if you're using rel=canonical.
-
Any time!
-
Got it! Thank you.
-
Pages canonicalized to the same page aren't duplicates, but their titles may still be. Canonicalization only affects the content of the page, not the title; the pages can still be resolved separately in the browser, so their titles may still be duplicates of one another.
If there are pages you don't want to surface in search results, you can noindex, follow those pages to prevent them showing up.
Sorry if my previous answer was a bit confusing! Hope this helps! If you've got more questions, feel free to write in to help@moz.com and we'll do what we can to sort things out for ya!
-
Thanks for your response. So you are saying that the pages that are canonicalized to the same page still are considered duplicates?
Let's say that Page A, Page B, and Page C all have the same title, with Page A being the canonical page. If Page B and Page C are both canonicalized to Page A, does that mean that Page B and C are considered to have duplicate titles while A is okay?
-
Hi there! Tawny from the Help Team here. Sergio's answer is helpful if you're dealing with duplicate content issues, and the links in that answer might help you figure out how to resolve those issues!
Pages are considered to have duplicate titles only if their titles are exact matches. There is no notion of overlapping or partial matches for this purpose. Like duplicate content, canonical versions should be considered, but not pages that refer to the canonical version. Furthermore, two pages with blank titles should not be considered duplicates of one another.
You can verify the page title by viewing the source code of the page itself. I hope this helps! Drop us a line at help@moz.com if you have any other questions or if there's anything that needs clarifying!
-
Hi,
I recently made the same question to moz support, here is my question and the reply:
QUESTION:
I am having a problem with a duplicated content error
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Crawl Issues Report - Duplicate Page Content for Bajalibros Argentina (www.bajalibros.com/AR)
Generated at Wed Jul 27 15:22:27 +00:00 2016
URL
https://www.bajalibros.com/AR/Samanta-Schweblin-Autor-426833https://www.bajalibros.com/AR/Catherine-Clement-Autor-184525
THE REPLY
Hi there! I think this has to do with how our tools determine what is duplicate content. Our tool has a 90% tolerance for duplicate content, which means it will flag any content that has 90% of the same code between pages. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text, so often it's a matter of finding the best answer for the duplicate pages in question.
For instance, often with ecommerce sites, product pages will come up with duplicate content between two colors of the same item, and in that case it's good to use the canonical tag. If there are two versions of the site that exist - for instance, example.com/subfolder andwww.example.com/subfolder - you can put in 301 redirects to the correct page: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection. If it's just two pages on different subjects but thin content, filling out that content with an extra paragraph or two can help.
There are more in-depth explanations of common answers to duplicate content on this page, if you're curious!: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or if there's anything that needs clarifying!
Hope this applies to you too
Best
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 content from page links
So for the last month or so I have been going through fixing SEO content issues on our site. One of the biggest issues has been duplicate content with WHMCS. Some have been easy and other have been a nightmare trying to fix. Some of the duplicate content has been the login page when a page requires a login. For example knowledge base article that are only viewable by clients etc. Easily fixed for me as I dont really need them locked down like that. However pages like affiliate.php and pwreset.php that are only linked off of a page. I am unsure how to take care of these types. Here are some pages that are being listed as duplicate: Should this type of stuff be a 301 redirect to cart.php or would that break something. I am guessing that everything should point back to cart.php.
On-Page Optimization | | blueray
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...art.php?a=view
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...php?a=checkout These are the ones that are really weird to me. These are showing as duplicate content but pwreset is only a link of the KB category. It shows up as duplicate many times as does affilliate.php: https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...ebase/16/Email
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...16/pwreset.php Any help is overly welcome.0 -
Does a / at the end of a URL create a duplicate page?
Hello, I have just used (the amazing) Screaming Frog to check my site and it is listing the two following pages as having duplicate titles, making me think it is seeing them as duplicate pages. http://zenplugs.com/zenplugs-molded-earphones/ http://zenplugs.com/zenplugs-molded-earphones Do I need to redirect one of these? Thanks in advance! Toby
On-Page Optimization | | T0BY0 -
SVG image files causing multiple title tags on page - SEO issue?
Does anyone have any experience with SVG image files and on-page SEO? A client is using them and it seems they use the title tag in the same way a regular image (JPG/PNG) would use an image ALT tag. I'm concerned that search engines will see the multiple title tags on the page and that this will cause SEO issues. Regular crawlers like Moz flag it as a second title tag, however it's outside the header and in a SVG wrap so the crawlers really should understand that this is a SVG title rather than a second page title. But is this the case? If anyone has experience with this, I'd love to hear about it.
On-Page Optimization | | mrdavidingram2 -
Meta Title for Category Pages
I am trying to improve the SEO for a few key category pages on my blog. I have two ranking really well so I want to boost them and bring up some others. Can I put two keywords in the meta title? Example: Maternity Deals | Pregnancy Deals Or should I just stick with one? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
Locating Duplicate Pages
Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index. Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Is there a way to export the On-page Optimization report data to Excel?
I am preparing recommendations for my client's Webmaster from the On-page Report Card. I am integrating them into a larger Excel spreadsheet with other recommended changes. So many SEO Moz reports can be exported to Excel. Is this an exception, or am I missing something? It would really save me a lot of time and effort.
On-Page Optimization | | calalouf0 -
Is reported duplication on the pages or their canonical pages?
There are several sections getting flagged for duplication on one of our sites: http://mysite.com/section-1/?something=X&confirmed=true
On-Page Optimization | | Safelincs
http://mysite.com/section-2/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-3/?something=X&confirmed=true Each of the above are showing as having duplicates of the other sections. Indeed, these pages are exactly the same (it's just an SMS confirmation page you enter your code in), however, they all have canonical links back to the section (without the query string), i.e. section-1, section-2 and section-3 respectively. These three sections have unique content and aren't flagged up for duplications themselves, so my questions are: Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates, and if so why are the canonical links being ignored? or Are the canonical pages without the query strings the duplicates, and if so why don't they appear as URLs in their own right in the duplicate content report? I am guessing it's the former, but I can't figure out why it would ignore the canonical links. Any ideas? Thanks0 -
Multiple silos/products/landing pages. How to design the root page for conversion?
Hi everyone, First post. Tried a few awkward searches on the topic but I must be using bad keywords. I'm re-designing a site that has multiple products and matching multiple audiences. This means we have multiple sillos for multiple groups of keywords with the supporting pages for each silo landing page. Currently I'm working on updating the look and text of those landing pages for each silo to increase conversion. This leaves me with the root web page. We get quite a lot of search traffic from people searching our brand name - so this results in clicks straight through to our root domain. There are no product specific landing pages because it could be any one of the 3-5 different personas we have hitting the site from that source. Does anyone have any good examples of where a site has had multiple products and needed to segregate their audience on a root top page? I'd like to see some examples and hear peoples thoughts. At the moment I'm thinking I need to fill that page up with trust factors as to why people should use us as a company, along with navigational elements in relation to each and every product so they can click through to the proper landing page. The main way I can see on executing that is to have a rotating banner with the same tag line "this is what we do" but be alternating between banners relating to each product.. with their own click through button to go to the respective landing page. Thoughts anyone? Example of sites doing this well?
On-Page Optimization | | specific0