Crawl Errors and Duplicate Content
-
SEOmoz's crawl tool is telling me that I have duplicate content at "www.mydomain.com/pricing" and at "www.mydomain.com/pricing.aspx". Do you think this is just a glitch in the crawl tool (because obviously these two URL's are the same page rather than two separate ones) or do you think this is actually an error I need to worry about? Is so, how do I fix it?
-
There are two aspects to the issue:
1. Resolve the cause of the problem. Crawl your site, locate any links to alternate URLs and change the links on your site to use the correct version of the URL.
2. Add a 301 redirect from /bad-url to /good-url. This will ensure any link juice to the bad urls is retained, along with providing a good user experience.
-
You would add the canonical tag to your existing page.
You need to decide how you wish your page to be listed.
Those are two different URLs. They COULD lead to two different pages, but you are choosing to have them lead to the same page, which is a very standard practice. You need to let search engines know how you want the page to be listed. The URL without the .aspx extension is the friendlier URL. I would suggest choosing that one but it is up to you.
-
What page should I add the canonical tag to. From my research a canonical tag in function operates in a similar way to the 301 redirect. However I only have one content page even though it has two URL's. Do I need to create literally two different versions of this content and put the canonical tag on the unwanted page?
-
Hmm, I don't understand this. If a server can detect that these two URLs are the same why can't Google's billion dollar algorithm detect that these are the same?
-
This is not a glitch in the crawl tool. It is something that needs to be fixed.
As Cody suggested, search engines will not understand which URL is correct and any link credit can wind up being split.
Adding a canonical tag to your page will resolve the issue.
I would also examine the crawl report and look at the Referrer to determine if you have any links to the undesired page.
-
The thing is, in the eyes of a crawler, they are different pages, just like http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com are the same page, but the crawlers will see them as different pages.
Are you using URL rewriting to get rid of the extension? If so I could see where this might cause a canonicalization issue if you don't tell the search engines which page you want to be ranked by using rel=canonical or redirecting from pricing.aspx to pricing.
Try using OSE on pricing and then pricing.html and see if you get different statistics.
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 Footer Content Issue
Please check given screenshot URL. As per the screenshot we are using highlighted content through out the website in the footer section of our website (https://www.mastersindia.co/) . So, please tell us how Google will treat this content. Will Google count it as duplicate content or not? What is the solution in case if the Google treat it as duplicate content. Screenshot URL: https://prnt.sc/pmvumv
Technical SEO | | AnilTanwarMI0 -
Duplicate content
I have one client with two domains, identical products to appear on both domains. How should I handle this?
Technical SEO | | Hazel_Key0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi there, I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content: We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots? The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great! Thanks very much! George
Technical SEO | | canadageorge0 -
Magento Duplicate Content help!
How can I remove the duplicate page content in my Magento store from being read as duplicate. I added the Magento robots file that i have used on many stores and it keeps giving us errors. Also we have enabled the canonical links in magento admin I am getting 3616 errors and can't seem to get around it .. any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | adamxj20 -
Wordpress tags and duplicate content?
I've seen a few other Q&A posts on this but I haven't found a complete answer. I read somewhere a while ago that you can use as many tags as you would like. I found that I rank for each tag I used. For example, I could rank for best night clubs in san antonio, good best night clubs in san antonio, great best night clubs in san antonio, top best night clubs in san antonio, etc. However, I now see that I'm creating a ton of duplicate content. Is there any way to set a canonical tag on the tag pages to link back to the original post so that I still keep my rankings? Would future tags be ignored if I did this?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Determining where duplicate content comes from...
I am getting duplicate content warnings on the SEOMOZ crawl. I don't know where the content is duplicated. Is there a site that will find duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | JML11790 -
Up to my you-know-what in duplicate content
Working on a forum site that has multiple versions of the URL indexed. The WWW version is a top 3 and 5 contender in the google results for the domain keyword. All versions of the forum have the same PR, but but the non-WWW version has 3,400 pages indexed in google, and the WWW has 2,100. Even worse yet, there's a completely seperate domain (PR4) that has the forum as a subdomain with 2,700 pages indexed in google. The dupe content gets completely overwhelming to think about when it comes to the PR4 domain, so I'll just ask what you think I should do with the forum. Get rid of the subdomain version, and sometimes link between two obviously related sites or get rid of the highly targeted keyword domain? Also what's better, having the targeted keyword on the front of Google with only 2,100 indexed pages or having lower rankings with 3,400 indexed pages? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Hondaspeder0