Duplicate Page Titles
-
I had an issue where I was getting duplicate page titles for my index file. The following URLs were being viewed as duplicates:
www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com
www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/index.html
www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/
I tried many solutions, and came across the rel="canonical".
So i placed the the following in my index.html:
I did a crawl, and it seemed to correct the duplicate content. Now I have a new message, and just want to verify if this is bad for search engines, or if it is normal. Please view the attached image.
-
Hi Erik,
Everyone here has given you good advice, so let me just add my 2 cents.
301's using htaccess can be tricky, so if you get in over your head don't worry too much about it - the canonical tag should do the trick. Every time you use a canonical on your site, you'll see a notice in your crawl diagnostics dashboard. This is just a "notice", not a warning or an error. We just want you to know our spiders found a canonical in case you didn't intend to be there.
Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Give this one a try Erik.
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm
Be sure to assign in your webmaster tools if you are using either www. or no www too. (site config - settings). Choose one of the options to ensure you don't get both types showing up in your SERPs.
Good luck
-
Thanks everyone, a link to a rewrite code for 301 would be great.
-
I also would have fixed this with a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. In addition, you have calusacrossinganimalhospital.com and www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com that resolve independently, so you likely have at least six URLs for your home page.
Let us know if you'd like a hand finding the right rewrite code, or if your website developer is OK with just taking this instruction and fixing things for you.
-
Hi Erik, If there is a good intent (which there is), this is normal. It's similar when SEOmoz will record the number of 301's, you are looking to see whether or not what you have implemented has actually been noticed. In general for your scenario I would have done a 301 redirect, using the htaccess file to strengthen the domain authority. In addition, Erik check out Google Webmaster Tools to ensure any other duplicate page titles are not appearing for the site. Hope this helps, Vahe
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
-
Duplicate Content on a Page Due to Responsive Version
What are the implications if a web designer codes the content of the site twice into the page in order to make the site responsive? I can't add the url I'm afraid but the H1 and the content appear twice in the code in order to produce both a responsive version and a desktop version. This is a Wordpress site. Is Google clever enough to distinguish between the 2 versions and treat them individually? Or will Google really think that the content has been repeated on the same page?
Technical SEO | | Wagada0 -
How can I provide titles and descriptive text for our list of USPs on the same page optimized both for usability and SEO
I am rebuilding our website together with an agency and I am stuck with the following problem: We have a page which will provide the visitor with a quick and convincing impression why he should chose our enterprise. On this page we want to show our USPs (Unique Selling Points) each with a title and a short description. Now my preferred way of presenting those USPs would be of a list of the titles (which permits to see all USPs without having to read a lot of text) where each title can be clicked to expand the description (in case you want to know more about this specific USP) and if you click on another title the previously clicked title description will collapse and the new description expand and so on (similar to this page: http://www.berlin-city-immobilien.de/38.html - I'm talking about the list in the middle of the page starting with the headline "Dabei profitieren Sie von folgenden Vorteilen"). Since I also want to use these descriptions as on page SEO-texts I checked whether Google might not index or at least value "click to expand content" less than plain text in the body of the page and I stumbled over this article: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html. According to this article Google will definitely discount the descriptions on my page. Does anyone have an idea how to solve this problem? Either by suggesting a different way to show titles and descriptions on the page or maybe by suggesting a workaround so Google will not treat the descriptions as "click to expand text". Thank you already in advance for your input.
Technical SEO | | Benni
Ben0 -
Home page duplicate content...
Hello all! I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end: http://www.example.com
Technical SEO | | LiamMcArthur
http://www.example.com/ For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page? rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />0 -
Would Google Call These Pages Duplicate Content?
Our Web store, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/index.html, has struggled with duplicate content issues for some time. One aspect of duplicate content is a page like this: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html. When an audio book title goes out-of-publication we keep the page at our store and display a http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html whenever a visitor attempts to visit a specific title that is OOP. There are several thousand OOP pages. Would Google consider these OOP pages duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | lbohen0 -
Why are pages linked with URL parameters showing up as separate pages with duplicate content?
Only one page exists . . . Yet I link to the page with different URL parameters for tracking purposes and for some reason it is showing up as a separate page with duplicate content . . . Help? rpcIZ.png
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Issue: Duplicate Pages Content
Hello, Following the setting up of a new campaign, SEOmoz pro says I have a duplicate page content issue. It says the follwoing are duplicates: http://www.mysite.com/ and http://www.mysite.com/index.htm This is obviously true, but is it a problem? Do I need to do anything to avoid a google penalty? The site in question is a static html site and the real page only exsists at http://www.mysite.com/index.htm but if you type in just the domain name then that brings up the same page. Please let me know what if anything I need to do. This site by the way, has had a panda 3.4 penalty a few months ago. Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | Colski0 -
Duplicate Page Issue
Dear All, I am facing stupid duplicate page issue, My whole site is in dynamic script and all the URLs were in dynamic, So i 've asked my programmer make the URLs user friendly using URL Rewrite, but he converted aspx pages to htm. And the whole mess begun. Now we have 3 different URLs for single page. Such as: http://www.site.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=Multi-Day+City+Tours http://www.tsite.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=multi-day-city-tours http://www.site.com/city-tour/multi-day-city-tours/page4-0.htm I think my programmer messed up the URL Rewrite in ASP.net(Nginx) or even didn't use it. So how do i overcome this problem? Should i add canonical tag in both dynamic URLs with pointing to pag4-0.htm. Will it help? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Htm vs. aspx page extensions & duplicate content
We have a client whose site is fairly new. There isn't much in the way of SEO results so far. In their content management system they have implemented friendly URLs and changed the extensions from aspx to htm. Now the htm pages are all indexed in Google but when I run a campaign report in SEOmoz it shows that all pages are duplicated with there being both htm and aspx pages for each page. Should we do 301 redirects from the aspx pages to the htm pages? Or would we be safe by removing the htm pages and letting Google reindex the site with the aspx page extensions? Does Google have any kind of preference as to what the page extensions are as long as the URLs include keywords?
Technical SEO | | IvieDigital0