SEOmoz suddenly reporting duplicate content with no changes???
-
I am told the crawler has been updated and wanted to know if anyone else is seeing the same thing I am.
SEOmoz reports show many months of no duplicate content problems. As of last week though, I get a little over a thousand pages reported as dupe content errors.
Checking these pages I find there is similar content (hasn't changed) with keywords that are definitely different. Many of these pages rank well in Google, but SEOmoz is calling them out as duplicate content. Is SEOmoz attempting to closely imitate Google's perspective in this matter and therefore telling me that I need to seriously change the similar content?
Anyone else seeing something like this?
-
Hi
We see the extreme raise in the duplicate content of our site too. If the sensitivity is adapted, will these graphs come down again?
What is your opinion on how Google sees a webshop with lot's of products and filter options? Our site www.dmlights.com/massive for example can have a lot of filtering but we try to counter this in Webmaster Tools with the URL parameters.
Do you suggest to adapt this for good seo?
Wondering about your opinions. Thanks.
-
Hey Scott,
Again, we're sorry about the odd jump in duplicate content errors!
We just launched a new crawler and it is being extremely sensitive to duplicate content. As of now we are picking up duplicate pages on your domain via:
https clones of URLs
Some pages have a “/” trailing after the URL and some don’t
We are also ignoring some rel=canonical directives
This is an issue that other users are seeing with their crawls. Our engineers have made some changes to the crawler to scale back the sensitivity to these issues on the crawler and you should be seeing the changes within a week or two.
We're really sorry for the confusion.
Best of Luck,
Chiaryn
-
Two good suggestions so far, and both I had checked. Thanks KJ Rogers and Ryan Kent.
This is starting to look like it boils down to how much the new SEOmoz crawler sees content in the same way that Google does.
We did not make any site-wide changes and the URLs identified as duplicate in the report are valid URLs that actually hold similar content (keywords and so forth were changed for each version of a slightly different product through an Excel Concatenate construct to build the content). We have actually seen these pages climb in rank over the months since the content was added.
So, like I said, the sudden identification of these as duplicate by the moz crawler is suspicious to me. Not sure it sees things the way Google does.
-
Without examining your site and the pages involved it is not possible for me to share feedback.
Is it possible you made any recent site wide changes? Changes to your header, navigation, footer or sidebar could have pushed you passed a certain threshhold of duplicate content which triggered a flag.
-
I got the same thing last week. I later found out that mine, using dynamic content on the same page, had speical characters in the url which was taking crawlers to an error page. The error page was showing a list of pages with the url's capitalized. I was able to fix some of them, but it scared the heck out of me.
I had to run a crawl test from SEOMoz to filter out what was going on. Perhaps you have something similar?
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
-
Sudden increase in backlinks with "Link Reclamation": Any risk from Google?
Hi all, We failed to redirect the links of our old website versions to new website pages for years and we are planning to now redirect all those old links to new in the process of link reclamation. This activity may increase the back links suddenly or steadily. If there is sudden increase in backlinks, will it hurts us? What's Google's stand? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Rel canonical on other page instead of duplicate page. How Google responds?
Hi all, We have 3 pages for same topics. We decided to use rel canonical and remove old pages from search to avoid duplicate content. Out of these 3 pages....1 and 2 type of pages have more similar content where 3 type don't have. Generally we must use rel canonical between 1 and 2. But I am wondering what happens if I canonical between 1 and 3 while 2 has more similar content? Will Google respects it or penalise as we left the most similar page and used other page for canonical. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Duplicate pages in language versions, noindex in sitemap and canonical URLs in sitemap?
Hi SEO experts! We are currently in the midst of reducing our amount of duplicate titles in order to optimize our SEO efforts. A lot of the "duplicate titles" come from having several language versions of our site. Therefore, I am wondering: 1. If we start using "" to make Google (and others) aware of alternative language versions of a given site/URL, how big a problem will "duplicate titles" then be across our domains/site versions? 2. Is it a problem that we in our sitemap include (many) URL's to pages that are marked with noindex? 3. Are there any problems with having a sitemap that includes pages that includes canonical URL's to other pages? Thanks in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | TradingFloor.com0 -
Future address change and local search
I have a client who targets a particular city, and up until now has had his physical location in the suburbs of that city. This April 1, his office will have the city address he has been targeting. I have spent a lot of time over the past year claiming ownership of all local directory listings and consolidating addresses as he has moved several times in the past 5 years. Looking at this as an opportunity to get the official USPS address he will be using and use the exact same address for everything. So many different variations out there right now for him. Wondering if it would be ok to start promoting the new address before the April 1 move and also when to start with the directory listings. Also, have held off on purchasing the yahoo directory link because of the suburban address but reconsidering this as of April 1 as well.
Algorithm Updates | | c2g0 -
Domain Change: Leave The Old Domain Homepage Up
We are going to be redesigning our website and switching to a new domain. I think we will set up a permanent 301 redirect from each page of the old domain to a page on the new domain. We would like to leave the old domain homepage up with all content removed and have a link pointing to the new domain. Is there any SEO harm to leaving the old domain homepage up? Thank you! Jessie
Algorithm Updates | | JessieT0 -
Changing in website design reduce traffic? I don't think so.
HI, Around the month of Nov I was working on the website. Due to some reasons I have to change the design of website. I saw my traffic going down and down(70 - 100/day) so roll back it on previous one. after that it improve little bit but not as on previously. (traffic 250 - 300/day). Question: All Urls, content and links are same then how that can effect on the traffic. We have removed all the errors that was shown in the seomoz report.But traffic is still the issue here. We are working on SEO area enough and try to recover from it. Your suggestion may be helpful for us.So I am looking forward for your answers. how i can over come with it. Thanks Regards
Algorithm Updates | | lucidsoftech0 -
Google Algorithm change? - Brand name now overwriting title tag?
Anyone else noticing this happening? In Google search results, many of my sites are now showing up in the following fashion... "Site name: page title" I read a few articles in the past few days that state that Google may be playing with the algo but have not read anything from Google directly. I should add that I first noticed this on Feb. 21 and have seen it rolling out more and more since. I have only noticed it on a few competitor websites thus far. Edit:Some links talking about the subject http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html http://semandseo.blogspot.ca/2013/03/google-brand-title-in-search.html http://www.designbigger.com/blog/seo/google-rewrites-page-titles-to-push-brand-over-keywords/
Algorithm Updates | | mattylac0 -
Is this the best way to get rid of low quality content?
Hi there, after getting hit by the Panda bear (30% loss in traffic) I've been researching ways to get rid of low quality content. From what I could find the best advise seemed to be a recommendation to use google analytics to find your worst performing pages (go to traffic sources - google organic - view by landing page). Any page that hasn't been viewed more than 100 times in 18 months should be a candidate for a deletion. Out of over 5000 pages and using this report we identified over 3000 low quality pages which I've begun exporting to excel for further examination. However, starting with the worst pages (according to analytics) I'm noticing some of our most popular pages are showing up here. For example: /countries/Panama is showing up as zero views but the correct version (with the end slash) countries/Panama/ is showing up as having over 600 views. I'm not sure how google even found the former version of the link but I'm even less sure how to proceed now (the webmaster was going to put a no-follow on any crap pages but this is now making him nervous about the whole process). Some advise on how to proceed from here would be fantastico and danke <colgroup><col width="493"></colgroup>
Algorithm Updates | | BrianYork-AIM0