Duplicate Content Warning For Pages That Do Not Exist
-
Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here.
I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around.
Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go.
Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption
url 1: /
url 2: /about/who-we-are
I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear
The second one I am getting is the following:
/services/57/
/services/
Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page
the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools.
If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this.
Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this.
Thanks in advance
-
Hi,
Thanks for the reply. the problem with the canonical is that I cannot edit the services/57/ page with wordpress because as soon as I click edit it goes to edit the /services/ page.
For the yoast canonical to work i would need to add in the real url into the /57/ page of which I cant do , or am i wrong there?
The problem also is that I can add any number apart from /57/ and they all lead back to /services/. At the moment Google has only indexed both /services/ and /service/57/
Thanks
-
Add canonical tags to your pages this is a must with wordpress category pages and tag pages etc.
somewhere on your site google is crawling and indexing/seeing services/57 which is really services/ - but without the canonical added to services/ google doesn't know that is the page that should be considered the representative page.
install the YOAST seo plugin for wordpress, install it and configure it to properly add canonical tags and noindex tags. it's really easy takes like 10 minutes after you instal and activate it
if this helped you out please feel free to thumbs up or mark as good answer! if you send me the URL i can take a closer look for you
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
-
Defining duplicate content
If you have the same sentences or paragraphs on multiple pages of your website, is this considered duplicate content and will it hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mnapier120 -
Content Strategy/Duplicate Content Issue, rel=canonical question
Hi Mozzers: We have a client who regularly pays to have high-quality content produced for their company blog. When I say 'high quality' I mean 1000 - 2000 word posts written to a technical audience by a lawyer. We recently found out that, prior to the content going on their blog, they're shipping it off to two syndication sites, both of which slap rel=canonical on them. By the time the content makes it to the blog, it has probably appeared in two other places. What are some thoughts about how 'awful' a practice this is? Of course, I'm arguing to them that the ranking of the content on their blog is bound to be suffering and that, at least, they should post to their own site first and, if at all, only post to other sites several weeks out. Does anyone have deeper thinking about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Possible duplicate content issue
Hi, Here is a rather detailed overview of our problem, any feedback / suggestions is most welcome. We currently have 6 sites targeting the various markets (countries) we operate in all websites are on one wordpress install but are separate sites in a multisite network, content and structure is pretty much the same barring a few regional differences. The UK site has held a pretty strong position in search engines the past few years. Here is where we have the problem. Our strongest page (from an organic point of view) has dropped off the search results completely for Google.co.uk, we've picked this up through a drop in search visibility in SEMRush, and confirmed this by looking at our organic landing page traffic in Google Analytics and Search Analytics in Search Console. Here are a few of the assumptions we've made and things we've checked: Checked for any Crawl or technical issues, nothing serious found Bad backlinks, no new spammy backlinks Geotarggetting, this was fine for the UK site, however the US site a .com (not a cctld) was not set to the US (we suspect this to be the issue, but more below) On-site issues, nothing wrong here - the page was edited recently which coincided with the drop in traffic (more below), but these changes did not impact things such as title, h1, url or body content - we replaced some call to action blocks from a custom one to one that was built into the framework (Div) Manual or algorithmic penalties: Nothing reported by search console HTTPs change: We did transition over to http at the start of june. The sites are not too big (around 6K pages) and all redirects were put in place. Here is what we suspect has happened, the https change triggered google to re-crawl and reindex the whole site (we anticipated this), during this process, an edit was made to the key page, and through some technical fault the page title was changed to match the US version of the page, and because geotargetting was not turned on for the US site, Google filtered out the duplicate content page on the UK site, there by dropping it off the index. What further contributes to this theory is that a search of Google.co.uk returns the US version of the page. With country targeting on (ie only return pages from the UK) that UK version of the page is not returned. Also a site: query from google.co.uk DOES return the Uk version of that page, but with the old US title. All these factors leads me to believe that its a duplicate content filter issue due to incorrect geo-targetting - what does surprise me is that the co.uk site has much more search equity than the US site, so it was odd that it choose to filter out the UK version of the page. What we have done to counter this is as follows: Turned on Geo targeting for US site Ensured that the title of the UK page says UK and not US Edited both pages to trigger a last modified date and so the 2 pages share less similarities Recreated a site map and resubmitted to Google Re-crawled and requested a re-index of the whole site Fixed a few of the smaller issues If our theory is right and our actions do help, I believe its now a waiting game for Google to re-crawl and reindex. Unfortunately, Search Console is still only showing data from a few days ago, so its hard to tell if there has been any changes in the index. I am happy to wait it out, but you can appreciate that some of snr management are very nervous given the impact of loosing this page and are keen to get a second opinion on the matter. Does the Moz Community have any further ideas or insights on how we can speed up the indexing of the site? Kind regards, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Duplicate content but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
Search console, duplicate content and Moz
Hi, Working on a site that has duplicate content in the following manner: http://domain.com/content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulneuteboom
http://www.domain.com/content Question: would telling search console to treat one of them as the primary site also stop Moz from seeing this as duplicate content? Thanks in advance, Best, Paul. http0 -
Duplicate Internal Content on E-Commerce Website
Hi, I find my e-commerce pharmacy website is full of little snippets of duplicate content. In particular: -delivery info widget repeated on all the product pages -product category information repeated product pages (e.g. all medicines belonging to a certain category of medicines have identical side effects and I also include a generic snippet of the condition the medicine treats) Do you think it will harm my rankings to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deelo5550 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0 -
Duplicate page Content
There has been over 300 pages on our clients site with duplicate page content. Before we embark on a programming solution to this with canonical tags, our developers are requesting the list of originating sites/links/sources for these odd URLs. How can we find a list of the originating URLs? If you we can provide a list of originating sources, that would be helpful. For example, our the following pages are showing (as a sample) as duplicate content: www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=11 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=12 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=15 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=2 "How did you get all those duplicate urls? I have tried to google the "contact us", "news", "video" pages. I didn't get all those duplicate pages. The page id=87 on the most of the duplicate pages are not supposed to be there. I was wondering how the visitors got to all those duplicate pages. Please advise." Note, the CMS does not create this type of hybrid URLs. We are as curious as you as to where/why/how these are being created. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlemieux0