Why aren't canonical tags reducing duplicate page title/content?

[TJSSEO]

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

[RyanKent]

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.

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[RyanKent]

I have submitted a new crawl report request for the updated URL.

[TJSSEO]

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

[RyanKent]

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.

[TJSSEO]

Thank you. Here's the site link. Self Catering Boston

[TJSSEO]

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.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.

[RyanKent]

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?