How to remove Duplicate content due to url parameters from SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostics
-
Hello all
I'm currently getting back over 8000 crawl errors for duplicate content pages . Its a joomla site with virtuemart and 95% of the errors are for parameters in the url that the customer can use to filter products.
Google is handling them fine under webmaster tools parameters but its pretty hard to find the other duplicate content issues in SEOMoz with all of these in the way.
All of the problem parameters start with
?product_type_
Should i try and use the robot.txt to stop them from being crawled and if so what would be the best way to include them in the robot.txt
Any help greatly appreciated.
-
Hi Tom
It took a while but I got there in the end. I was using joomla 1.5 and I downloaded a component called "tag meta" which allows you to insert tags including the canonical tag on specific urls or more importantly urls which begin in a certain way. Now how you use it depends on how your sef urls are set up or what sef component you are using but you can put a canonical tag on every url in a section that has view-all-products in it.
So in one of my examples I put a canonical tag pointing to /maternity-tops.html (my main category page for that section) on every url that began with /maternity-tops/view-all-products
I hope this if of help to you. It takes a bit of playing around with but it worked for me. The component also has fairly good documentation.
Regards
Damien
-
Damien,
Are you able to explain how you were able to do this within virtuemart?
Thanks
Tom
-
So leave the 5 pages of dresses as they are because they are all original but have the canonical tag on all of the filter parameters pointing to Page 1 of dresses.
Thank you for your help Alan
-
It should be on all versions of the page, all pointing to the one version.
Search engines will then see all as one page
-
Hi Alan
Thanks for getting back to me so fast. I'm slightly confused on this so an example might help One of the pages is http://www.funkybumpmaternity.com/Maternity-Dresses.html.
There are 5 pages of dresses with options on the left allowing you to narrow that down by color, brand, occasion and style. Every time you select an option on combination of options on the left for example red it will generate a page with only red dresses and a url of http://www.funkybumpmaternity.com/Maternity-Dresses/View-all-products.html?product_type_1_Colour[0]=Red&product_type_1_Colour_comp=find_in_set_any&product_type_id=1
The options available are huge which I believe is why i'm getting so many duplicate content content issues on SEOMoz pro. Google is handling the parameters fine.
How should I implement the canonical tag? Should I have a tag on all filter pages referencing page 1 of the dresses? Should pages 2-5 have the tag on them? If so would this mean that the dresses on these pages would not be indexed?
-
This sounds more like a case for a canonical tag,
dont exculed with robots.txt this is akin to cutting off your arm, because you have a spliter in your finger.
When you exclude use robots, link juce passing though links to these pages is lost.
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
-
Why is MOZ crawl is returning URLs with variable results showing Missing Meta Desc? Example: http://nw-naturals.net/?page_number_0=47
Can you help me dive down into my website guts to find out why the MOZ crawl is returning URLs with variable results? And saying this is missing a description when it's not really a page? Example: http://nw-naturals.net/?page_number_0=47. I've asked MOZ but it's a web development issue so they can't help me with it. Has anyone had an issue with this on their website? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | lewisdesign0 -
Duplicated content generated by keywords
Hello! I am kind of new to SEO and MOZ, so I really need your help to understand why some of my keywords generate duplicated content. Meaning, in my blog posts I use various SEO keywords. It shows up that in my MOZ crawl analysis, I have these keywords listed as duplicates: so two/three different keywords are pointing to the same articles and are considered duplicates? I really don't understand how it is possible. Did it also happen to you? I highly appreciate it. Thank you
Moz Pro | | DianaC0 -
Crawl Diagnostics Warnings - Duplicate Content
Hi All, I am getting a lot of warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some news stories or blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Should I ask google not to index the tag pages? Does it really affect my site? Thanks
Moz Pro | | skehoe0 -
Is there a way to perform a crawl diagnostics without creating a campaign?
If you wanted to perform a crawl diagnostics but your campaigns are at full capacity are you able to do this and how (or does this mean you will have to remove one campaign to make space for another)?
Moz Pro | | SarahAhmed3790 -
Why does my crawl diagnostics show duplicate content
My crawl diagnostics show duplicate content at mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html which are essentially the same file.
Moz Pro | | MSSBConsulting0 -
Configure parameter effect in google wmt to reduce overly dynamic urls
We are looking at a weatherforecast site with realtime information that is updated every 5 minutes. For this website many urls have 6 parameters The SEOmoz campagne found duplicate information and overly dynamic urls. Then we went to google wmt section url parameters and configured parameters like day, month, year (effect: none). The next weekly SEOmoz campagne showed a big reduction in duplicates and small reduction overly dynamic urls. How can we reduce these 'errors' further?
Moz Pro | | theonlinefactory0 -
Seomoz logging in
Hey, The seomoz toolbar was permenantly logged in. But for some reason after a period of inactivity it now logs out and I have to relogin. I'm using firefox, what could be causing this?
Moz Pro | | PeterM220 -
SEOmoz crawl error questions
I just got my first seomoz crawl report and was shocked at all the errors it generated. I looked into it and saw 7200 crawl errors. Most of them are duplicate page titles and duplicate page content. I clicked into the report and found that 97% of the errors were going off of one page It has ttp://legendzelda.net/forums/index.php/members/page__sort_key__joined__sort_order__asc__max_results__20 http://legendzelda.net/forums/index.php/members/page__sort_key__joined__sort_order__asc__max_results__20__quickjump__A__name_box__begins__name__A__quickjump__E etc Has 20 pages of slight variations of this link. It is all my members list or a search of my members list so it is not really duplicate content or anything. How can I get these errors to go away and make search my site is not taking a hit? The forum software I use is IPB.
Moz Pro | | NoahGlaser780