Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
-
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages.
The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title.
e.g.
Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products
Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title.
From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this?
Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
-
When you say "Google Webmaster tools," is it inside the seomoz pro dashboard? Or do I need to create a google webmaster account?
If you have a website, you should definitely have a Google WMT account. Go to www.google.com/webmasters and register your site. It is a must for anyone who cares about SEO for their site and related analytics.
For the SEOmoz report, I asked that same question to SEOmoz help. The reply I received was:
"it sounds you made a change to the way your site is indexed by Google directly in Webmaster Tools. Since we don't have access to GWT, we can't account for any changes that you've made in there, unfortunately. Furthermore, these issues are still present for crawlers other than Googlebot, so if you want to make sure those fixes are indexed by Bing/Yahoo, make sure to submit the fixes to their index tools or make the changes directly on your site. On the other hand, if you don't care about those search engines, feel free to just ignore our warnings. Our software is over-inclusive of errors so that you can choose which errors/warnings/issues to act on and how. We'd rather give you too much information than too little!"
With the ?pg=2 parameter, is there a way for google not to treat it as two URLs with same title and at the same time make both appear in search results?
In Google WMT you can see the Parameter Action as Don't Ignore. You would then need to fix the Duplicate Title issue on your site.
I am not advising this approach, but merely responding to your question of how to do it.
-
Sorry, but when you say "Google Webmaster tools," is it inside the seomoz pro dashboard? Or do I need to create a google webmaster account?
The reports I've given came from one of our Campaigns inside the SEOmoz PRo Dashboard. I don't see a Site Configuration here.
With the ?pg=2 parameter, is there a way for google not to treat it as two URLs with same title and at the same time make both appear in search results?
-
?pg=2, etc. is referred to by Google as parameters.
If you only want the main page to appear in search results, and you are confident of this decision, you can log into your Google Webmaster Tools and adjust your settings. From your Dashboard screen choose Site Configuration > Seetings > Parameter Handling. In the Parameter column you will see "page" listed. Change the action to "Ignore".
With the above noted, page-2 content would normally be viewed as it's own, unique page. Your product list on page-2 (or whatever you are listing) would be different then page 1. If you provide content on each page such as product descriptions, etc. then you shouldn't have the problem of page-2 duplicating page 1.
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it. But I'm a bit more concerned with the example I presented wherein product pages are displayed on several pages where the first URL is identified by ?pg=1 and the second URL by ?pg=2
For the WWW and non www, we can fix that one, but for the sample I presented, I'm not sure how to go about it.
-
I took a look at a few of your pages. Your issue is a common one and can easily be fixed.
Let's use your Rock-N-Roller Bunny page as an example:
http://masterpet.com.au/NZ_Products/Small-Animal/Sml-Animal-Specials/Rock-N-Roller-Bunny/
http://www.masterpet.com.au/NZ_Products/Small-Animal/Sml-Animal-Specials/Rock-N-Roller-Bunny/
Both of the above links go to the exact same page. The first link does not include the www in the URL. While these two links go to the same page, they are seen as two separate pages, and that is causing duplicate content issues. To resolve the problem take the following steps:
1. Decide which version of your URL you wish to use, the www or non-www form.
2. If you haven't already done so, log into Google Web Master Tools and set your preferred URL format.
3. Going forward, ensure any links you create for your site use the chosen URL format.
4. Add a canonical tag to your pages. This tag is a single link of HTML code added to the head of each page. If you decided upon using the www the format would be: http://www.masterpet.com.au/NZ_Products/Small-Animal/Sml-Animal-Specials/Rock-N-Roller-Bunny/" />
You may also wish to use a redirect in your .htaccess file to send visitors to the correct format of your page.
If you have a common template or structure for your site then these changes can all be done very quickly and then you can crawl your site again to confirm the matter is resolved.
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
-
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
Duplicate Content of Reseller Product?
There is a particular product/service that I resell through an API. There are quite a few of them and each one requires a lot of content. The company provides web content for each product but I'm wondering about the SEO implications of using it? Obviously using the content, it will not be unique so I won't be able to rank (easily at least) for these products. Are there any _negative_results that I can get from using this content though? If I simply won't rank for those products it's not an issue since I get traffic elsewhere. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | reliabox0 -
Localized domains and duplicate content
Hey guys, In my company we are launching a new website and there's an issue it's been bothering me for a while. I'm sure you guys can help me out. I already have a website, let's say ABC.com I'm preparing a localized version of that website for the uk so we'll launch ABC.co.uk Basically the websites are going to be exactly the same with the difference of the homepage. They have a slightly different proposition. Using GeoIP I will redirect the UK traffic to ABC.co.uk and the rest of the traffic will still visit .com website. May google penalize this? The site itself it will be almost the same but the homepage. This may count as duplicate content even if I'm geo-targeting different regions so they will never overlap. Thanks in advance for you advice
Technical SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Duplicate content with "no results found" search result pages
We have a motorcycle classifieds section that lets users search for motorcycles for sale using various drop down menus to pick year-make-type-model-trim, etc.. These search results create urls such as:
Technical SEO | | seoninjaz
www.example.com/classifieds/search.php?vehicle_manufacturer=Triumph&vehicle_category=On-Off Road&vehicle_model=Tiger&vehicle_trim=800 XC ABS We understand that all of these URL varieties are considered unique URLs by Google. The issue is that we are getting duplicate content errors on the pages that have no results as they have no content to distinguish themselves from each other. A URL like:
www.example.com/classifieds/search.php?vehicle_manufacturer=Triumph&vehicle_category=Sportbike
and
www.example.com/classifieds/search.php?vehicle_manufacturer=Honda&vehicle_category=Streetbike Will have a results page that says "0 results found". I'm wondering how we can distinguish these "unique" pages better? Some thoughts:
-make sure <title>reflects what was search<br />-add a heading that may say "0 results found for Triumph On-Off Road Tiger 800 XC ABS"<br /><br />Can anyone please help out and lend some ideas in solving this? <br /><br />Thank you.</p></title>0 -
Issue Duplicate Page Title
I'm having some really strange issues with duplicate page titles and I can't seem to figure out what's going on. I just got a new crawl from SEOMOZ and it's showing some duplicate page titles. http://www.example.com/blog/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/2/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/3/ Repeat .............. I have no idea what's going on, how these were duplicated, or how to correct it. Does anyone have a chance to take a look and see if you can figure out what's happening and what I need to do to correct the errors? I'm using Wordpress and all in one SEO plugin. Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Having both <title>and <meta name="title"...> on a web page?</title>
Hi All, Client of mine using reversed Meta Tags format in their website and Honestly i never saw such Meta Tags formats. In my opinion having 2 Title tags and wrong reversed description tag is not correct and the needs to be removed, and other tags need to be changed,too But they said that it probably doesn't make a difference because they don't think it affects search engine results and won't remove it just based on opinion. Because weird thing is Search Engines are apparently able to index them. So should i persist on correcting them or just hope for the best and ignore it?!?!?! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Why am i still getting duplicate page title warnings after implementing canonical URLS?
Hi there, i'm having some trouble understanding why I'm still getting duplicate page title warnings on pages that have the rel=canonical attribute. For example: this page is the relative url http://www.resnet.us/directory/auditor/az/89/home-energy-raters-hers-raters/1 and http://www.resnet.us/directory/auditor/az/89/home-energy-raters-hers-raters/2 is the second page of this parsed list which is linking back to the first page using rel=canonical. i have over 300 pages like this!! what should i do SEOmoz GURUS? how do i remedy this problem? is it a problem?
Technical SEO | | fourthdimensioninc0 -
Duplicate content handling.
Hi all, I have a site that has a great deal of duplicate content because my clients list the same content on a few of my competitors sites. You can see an example of the page here: http://tinyurl.com/62wghs5 As you can see the search results are on the right. A majority of these results will also appear on my competitors sites. My homepage does not seem to want to pass link juice to these pages. Is it because of the high level of Dup Content or is it because of the large amount of links on the page? Would it be better to hide the content from the results in a nofollowed iframe to reduce duplicate contents visibilty while at the same time increasing unique content with articles, guides etc? or can the two exist together on a page and still allow link juice to be passed to the site. My PR is 3 but I can't seem to get any of my internal pages(except a couple of pages that appear in my navigation menu) to budge of the PR0 mark even if they are only one click from the homepage.
Technical SEO | | Mulith0