Duplicate title issue
-
During the crwal SEO moz found duplicate title problems with quite a good number of pages. This was because my site has test questions like
http://www.skill-guru.com/12/scjp-5-mock-test/questions
and when user does next or previous, they can traverse to different pages but the title and descrition would remain same.
How can this probkem be resolved ?
-
That's a really tough one. For paginated search results, I would normally go with @128K's suggestion - let Google follow the search results, but don't index them. Unfortunately, these are both search results AND your content, which is a bit unusual.
I would still consider the META robots tag. Here's my argument - while all of these results are unique, landing on question #21 isn't very useful to search visitors, and they might bounce. It probably makes more sense to land them all on page #1. While you'll lose some indexable content, I suspect the higher conversion and loss of duplicates would offset that.
Rand had a good post about pagination, but again, it assumes a more typical search-results scenario (like a list of product snippets and titles):
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience
Likewise, the pages aren't duplicates, so I'd avoid the canonical tag, in the usual sense. There are viable AJAX approaches, but some will make the full content invisible to spiders.
There are SEOs who advocate using the canonical tag, but canonicalizing to a version of the page that displays ALL of the results on one page. That way, visitors still go through the list, but Google would see the full page of answers. You could also default Google to a different count of results/page (like 100) but then default visitors to 10, etc. It borders on cloaking, but it's off-white at worst, in my opinion.
-
The only thing I can suggest would be Ajax, but I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than myself will have a better answer for you. In any case, good luck.
-
In my case the contents are different. It is only the title and keywords which are repeated across pages. Since keywords tag is not important anymore, it is only the title which is hurting me.
-
Technically it's not duplicate content. If he gets traffic to particular keywords phrases from the test content then canonicalization would hurt his traffic. The traffic from the keywords might not be targeted to test takers, but if that's your only form of traffic then rel canonical would hurt; BAD. Please, correct me if I'm wrong though.
From google:
Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?
Yes. The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).
You should probably research for yourself before you take anyone's advice: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Personally though, I'd look into ajax. There are many freely available resources that you can use. Hope that helps.
-
This is a great example of good canonical usage.
-
You could change the title/description for each page reflecting the content, but that would take forever and probably doesn't fluctuate much page to page (on that specific test.) Optionally you could try using meta robots, but you may not rank when people search specific code snippets (or other test questions.)
name="robots" content="FOLLOW,NOINDEX" />
You might try out using ajax for the pages as in googles eyes it would only be considered one page. Hope it's helped.
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
-
Gallery Causing Duplicate Content Issues
Hi! I have a gallery on my website. When you click to view the next image it goes to a new page but the content is exactly the same as the first page. This is flagging up a duplicate content issue. What is the best way to fix this? Add a canonical tag to page 2,3,4 or add a noindex tag? I have found a lot of conflicting answers. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | emma19860 -
Are duplicate page titles fixed by the canonical tag
Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
XML Sitemap Issue or not?
Hi Everyone, I submitted a sitemap within the google webmaster tools and I had a warning message of 38 issues. Issue: Url blocked by robots.txt. Description: Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt. Example: the ones that were given were urls that we don't want them to be indexed: Sitemap: www.example.org/author.xml Value: http://www.example.org/author/admin/ My issue here is that the number of URL indexed is pretty low and I know for a fact that Robot.txt aren't good especially if they block URL that needs to be indexed. Apparently the URLs that are blocked seem to be URLs that we don't to be indexed but it doesn't display all URLs that are blocked. Do you think i m having a major problem or everything is fine?What should I do? How can I fix it? FYI: Wordpress is what we use for our website Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tay19860 -
Duplicate Page Titles and %3E, how can I avoid this?
In my crawl report I keep seeing duplicate page title warning with URL's being referenced twice: e.g. /company/ceo-message/ /company/ceo-message/%3E I'm using canonical link tags but after the new crawl report, I'm still seeing this duplicate page title crawl error. How can I avoid this? I've been looking for answers for a few days but don't seem to see this exact problem discussed. Any insight is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mxmo0 -
Need help with Joomla duplicate content issues
One of my campaigns is for a Joomla site (http://genesisstudios.com) and when my full crawl was done and I review the report, I have significant duplicate content issues. They seem to come from the automatic creation of /rss pages. For example: http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose is the page but the duplicate content shows up as http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose/rss It appears that Joomla creates feeds for every page automatically and I'm not sure how to address the problem they create. I have been chasing down duplicate content issues for some time and thought they were gone, but now I have about 40 more instances of this type. It also appears that even though there is a canonicalization plugin present and enabled, the crawl report shows 'false' for and rel= canonicalization tags Anyone got any ideas? Thanks so much... Scott | |
Technical SEO | | sdennison0 -
Masses (5,168 issues found) of Duplicate content.
Hi Mozzers, I have a site that has returned 5,168 issues with duplicate content. Where would you start? I started sorting via High page Authority first the highest being 28 all the way down to 1. I did want to use the rel=canonical tag as the site has many redirects already. The duplicates are caused by various category and cross category pages and search results such as ....page/1?show=2&sort=rand. I was thinking of going down the lines of a URL rewrite and changing the search anyway. Is it work redirecting everything in terms of results versus the effort of changing all the 5,168 issues? Thanks sm
Technical SEO | | Metropolis0 -
Multiple URLs in CMS - duplicate content issue?
So about a month ago, we finally ported our site over to a content management system called Umbraco. Overall, it's okay, and certainly better than what we had before (i.e. nothing - just static pages). However, I did discover a problem with the URL management within the system. We had a number of pages that existed as follows: sparkenergy.com/state/name However, they exist now within certain folders, like so: sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/name So we had an aliasing system set up whereby you could call the URL basically whatever you want, so that allowed us to retain the old URL structure. However, we have found that the alias does not override, but just adds another option to finding a page. Which means the same pages can open under at least two different URLs, such as http://www.sparkenergy.com/state/texas and http://www.sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/texas. I've tried pointing to the aliased URL in other parts of the site with the rel canonical tag, without success. How much of a problem is this with respect to duplicate content? Should we bite the bullet, remove the aliased URLs and do 301s to the new folder structure?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Re-direct issues
Forgive me for the novice question. But I was recently looking at open site explorer and was checking out my site www.visualawards.com , I know we have a re-direct to www.visualawards.com/home.php . After checking both URL's, I found that I have links pointing to both. Is this bad, am I diluting the links? If yes, which one should I point the future ones to, and is there anyway to recover the current links already? Thanks again for your help!!!
Technical SEO | | RENDEV0