Why aren't canonical tags reducing duplicate page title/content?
-
We have canonical tags set up for a feature page on one of our sites. This site has an image gallery controlled by javascript. To aid the user experience the image can also be specified by a URL parameter (the javascript also uses this URL to fetch the images). The SEOMoz report complains that the links to these images have duplicate page titles and content.
To try and combat this we set canonical tags to point only to the original page, without the slideshow parameter. e.g.
http://www.example.com/feature-page/
http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=1 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/
http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=2 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/
The latest SEOMoz report has come back and the errors still exist.
What can we do to remove these error messages?
Thanks
-
Hi Mark,
I have evaluated the crawl report. The canonical tag for your images is properly set. There are numerous issues the crawl report presents related to your site.
1. Your home page is duplicated. The URL with and without a trailing slash both are accessible.
2. Many pages are missing canonical tags.
3. You have a 302 redirect from your /how-to-find-us page to the same page with a trailing slash.
4. Most of your pages end without any tech extension, but some end in .html. I would suggest being consistent throughout your site.
5. You have some long title tags and pages with missing meta descriptions.
More specific to the images which are causing the issue, the system you have in place is a bit odd. Most sites which present various images for the same page have a means to do such without each image generating a new url for the same page. I would suggest investigating a different image viewer.
Good luck.
| |
| |
| |
-
I have submitted a new crawl report request for the updated URL.
-
Ryan,
Forgive me, I gave you the wrong URL. the original question related to www.earlscroftfarm.co.uk and not the doorway site.
Thank you for your time.
Mark
-
I have submitted the site for a SEOmoz crawl report so I can view the issue. The crawl should be completed within a day. I'll share the findings with you upon receipt of the report.
While looking at your site I noticed it is very clearly a doorway site. A search engine would likely determine the sole purpose of this site is to redirect traffic to earlscroftfarm.co.uk. It is highly likely Google has devalued all of the site's links.
Why? The sites are clearly operated by the same company, they are hosted on the same server, and the links are about as blatantly obvious as possible.The IPs of each site are different which could be interpreted as you intentionally trying to set up a deceptive link network.
The idea behind links to another sites being used to increase PR stems from the idea the links are earned from independent sources. Linking to your own site does not contribute to that valuation. If you feel this content is helpful, I would recommend merging it into your main site.
-
Thank you. Here's the site link. Self Catering Boston
-
Thanks, we'll wait for the next crawl.
I made the changes on Friday and the scan is dated as Sunday so I'll let it try again before I report a problem.
Thanks for your help.
-
Hi Mark,
If you added the canonical tags very recently, say the last 7-10 days, it's possible the latest crawl started before those tags were in place. (the dates in the Web App are usually the date the crawl finished processing the data, so it can be a bit confusing to follow)
As Ryan said, sounds like you did the right things setting the canonicals. If the problem persists after your next crawl, please contact the help team.
-
Hi Mark,
It sounds like you have taken the correct steps. The most likely answer to your problem is either the canonical tag was not properly written or there are some pages which are missing the tag.
A less likely possibility is a problem with the crawl tool. In that case you can reach out to help@seomoz.org for assistance.
Can you share your site URL so we can take a better look?
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
-
Right way to find quality free/non free directories to submit web page
I have one question about link building. What will be right way to find quality free/non free directories to submit my web page. My web page thematic is nail-art. Thanks and best regards
Moz Pro | | komir20040 -
Are there tools to discover duplicate content issues with the other websites?
We have issues with users copy-pasting content from other sources into our site. The only way I know to find out, is to manually (!!) copy a snippet of their text into google, to see if I get results from other sites. I have been googling for tools to help automate this process, but without luck. Can you recommend any?
Moz Pro | | betternow0 -
Error in Moz duplicate content reports
Hi - I've run the Moz campaign on a client's site. Moz is saying that there are duplicate content errors, and when I look at the errors it is showing that they are all to do with the non-www URLs having being duplicated in the www form of the URLs. However this is not the case - all the non-www URLs are all 301 redirected to the www URLs. Is this an error in the Moz tool? Has anybody experienced something similar?
Moz Pro | | rorynatkiel0 -
I'm seeing duplicate links listed in open site explorer. Can anyone explain why this might be happening?
For each link listed in Open Site Explorer, I am seeing two identical entries. You can see why this might be a problem for both workflow and data accuracy. Any ideas why this might be happening? Is there a setting or filter that I'm missing?
Moz Pro | | StephenEggett0 -
Need to find all pages that link to list of pages/pdf's
I know I can do this in OSE page by page, but is there a way I can do this in a large batch? There are 200+ PDF's that I need to figure out what pages (if any) link to the PDF. I'd rather not do this page by page, but rather copy-paste the entire list of pages I'm looking for. Any tools you know of that can do this?
Moz Pro | | ryanwats0 -
Duplicate Content and Titles in SEOMoz reports
I've had to rename some of the pages on my site and also move them to different locations. I placed a rel="canonical" on the old page pointing to the new one. The reports on my PRO Dashboard are telling me that I have Duplicate Content and Page Title errors. Do the SEOMoz automated reports take the rel="canonical" link into consideration or do I need to remove these pages and do a 301 redirect from the old to the new page?
Moz Pro | | TRICORSystems0 -
SEOMoz Pro still hasn't crawled 10k pages for one campaign
I looked for a question in the forum already for this but couldn't find anything. Perhaps I am using the wrong keywords, so I apologize if this is a duplicate. I recently signed up with SEOMoz Pro and added two campaigns. For one campaign, 10,000 pages were crawled. For the other campaign, only about 300. It's been 2 weeks since I created the campaigns. Is there a way to force a crawl of the site associated with the second campaign?
Moz Pro | | SharieBags0 -
Crawl Diagnostics and missing meta tags on noindex blog pages
Hi Guys/Gals We do love the Crawl Diagnostics, but do find the missing meta tags ("Missing Meta Description" Tag in this case) somewhat spammy. We use the "All in One SEO Pack" for our blog and it does stick in noindex,follow (as it should) on the pages that is of no use to us. "2008/04/page/2/" and the likes. Maybe I'm wrong but should the Diagnostics tool not respect the noindex tag and just ignore any warnings, since it should really mean that these pages are NOT included in the search index. Meaning that the other meta tags are really useless. Any thoughts?
Moz Pro | | sfseo0