Why is Google Reporting big increase in duplicate content after Canonicalization update?
-
Our web hosting company recently applied a update to our site that should have rectified Canonicalized URLs. Webmaster tools had been reporting duplicate content on pages that had a query string on the end.
After the update there has been a massive jump in Webmaster tools reporting now over 800 pages of duplicate content, Up from about 100 prior to the update plus it reporting some very odd pages (see attached image)
They claim they have implement Canonicalization in line with Google Panda & Penguin, but surely something is not right here and it's going to cause us a big problem with traffic.
Can anyone shed any light on the situation???
-
Hi All,
I finally got to the bottom of the problem and it is that they have not applied canonicalization across the site, only to certain pages which is not my understanding when they implemented the update a few weeks back.
So they are preparing a hot fix as part of a service pack to our site which will rectify this issue and apply canonicalization to all pages that contain query strings. This should clear that problem up once and for all.
Thank you both for your input, a great help.
-
Hi Deb... I have nice blogpost from seomoz blog for you written by Lindsey in which she has explained it very nicely about it.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions
In this post check the example of digg.com. Digg.com has blocked "submit" in robots.txt but still Google has indexed URLs. Check screenshot in the Blog post. Hope this help.
-
_Those URLs will be crawled by Google, but will not be Indexed. And that being said, there will be no more duplicate content issue. I hope I have made myself clear over here. _
-
Deb, even if you block those URLs in Robots.txt, Google will going to index those URLs because those URLs are interlink with website. The best way is to put canonical tag so that you will get inter linking benefits as well.
-
Fraser,
Till now they have not implemented Canonicalization in your website. After Canonicalization implementation also you will duplication errors in your webmaster account but it will not harm your ranking. Because Canonicalization helps Google in selecting the page from multiple version of similar page that has to displayed in SERP. In above example, First URL is the original URL but the second URL has some parameters in URLs so your preferred version of URL should be first one. After proper Canonicalization implementation you will only see URLs that you have submitted in your sitemap via Google Webmaster Tool.
And about two webmaster codes, I don't think we have setup two separate accounts, you can provide view or admin access from your webmaster account to them.
-
Either you will have to block these pages via Google Webmaster Tools by Using URL parameter or else you need to block them via robots.txt file like this –
To block this URL: http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/baby-towels/prodlist_ct493.htm?dir=1&size=100
You need to use this tag in robots.txt file – Disallow: /.htm?dir=
-
Hi,
Here are a couple of examples for you.
Duplication issue is showing because of below type of URLs:
http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/baby-towels/prodlist_ct493.htm
http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/baby-towels/prodlist_ct493.htm?dir=1&size=100 ```
-
The Canonical URL updates were supposed to have been implement some weeks back.
I have asked why there are 2 webmaster tools codes, I expect this is my account plus they have one to monitor things there end.
Query string parameters have been setup, but I am unsure if they are configured correctly as this is all a bit new to me and i am in there hands to deal with this really.
The URLs without query strings are submitted to Webmaster tools via site maps and they are the URLs we want indexed.
-
Can you please share the URL and some example pages where the problem of duplicate content is appearing?
-
Hi Fraser,
Are you talking about towelsrus.co.uk ? I didn't find any canonical tag in any source page of your website. Are they sure about implementation ? or they will implement it in future. And one more interesting point, why there are two webmaster code in your website's source page. Below are those to webmaster codes:
<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">google-site-verification</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">BJ6cDrRRB2iS4fMx2zkZTouKTPTpECs2tw-3OAvIgh4</a>" />
<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">google-site-verification</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">SjaHRLJh00aeQY9xJ81lorL_07UXcCDFgDFgG8lBqCk</a>" />
Have you blocked querystring parameters in "URL parameters" in Google webmaster
Tools ?
Duplication issue is showing because of below type of URLs:
http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/baby-towels/prodlist_ct493.htm
http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/baby-towels/prodlist_ct493.htm?dir=1&size=100
No canonical tag found on above URLs as well.
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 -
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 -
What is the best way to allow content to be used on other sites for syndication without taking the chance of duplicate content filters
Cookstr appears to be syndicating content to shape.com and mensfitness.com a) They integrate their data into partner sites with an attribution back to their site and skinned it with the partners look. b) they link the image back to their image hosted on cookstr c) The page does not have microformats or as much data as their own page does so their own page is better SEO. Is this the best strategy or is there something better they could be doing to safely allow others to use our content, we don't want to share the content if we're going to get hit for a duplicate content filter or have another site out rank us with our own data. Thanks for your help in advance! their original content page: http://www.cookstr.com/recipes/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta their syndicated content pages: http://www.shape.com/healthy-eating/healthy-recipes/recipe/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw
http://www.mensfitness.com/nutrition/healthy-recipes/recipe/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta0 -
Concerns about duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years. The url is www.betterbraces.com. We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website. The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products. The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues. However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-2836690 -
How do I fix the error duplicate page content and duplicate page title?
On my site www.millsheating.co.uk I have the error message as per the question title. The conflict is coming from these two pages which are effectively the same page: www.millsheating.co.uk www.millsheating.co.uk/index I have added a htaccess file to the root folder as I thought (hoped) it would fix the problem but I doesn't appear to have done so. this is the content of the htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^millsheating.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.millsheating.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.millsheating.co.uk/ [R=301,L] AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonHegarty0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi everyone, I have a TLD in the UK with a .co.uk and also the same site in Ireland (.ie). The only differences are the prices and different banners maybe. The .ie site pulls all of the content from the .co.uk domain. Is this classed as content duplication? I've had problems in the past in which Google struggles to index the website. At the moment the site appears completely fine in the UK SERPs but for Ireland I just have the Title and domain appearing in the SERPs, with no extended title or description because of the confusion I caused Google last time. Does anybody know a fix for this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | royb0 -
ECommerce syndication & duplicate content
We have an eCommerce website with original software products. We want to syndicate our content to partner and affiliate websites, but are worried about the effect of duplicate content all over the web. Note that this is a relatively high profile project, where thousands of sites will be listing hundreds of our products, with the exact same name, description, tags, etc. We read the wonderful and relevant post by Kate Morris on this topic (here: http://mz.cm/nXho02) and we realize the duplicate content is never the best option. Some concrete questions we're trying to figure out: 1. Are we risking penalties of any sort? 2. We can potentially get tens of thousands of links from this concept, all with duplicate content around them, but from PR3-6 sites, some with lots of authority. What will affect our site more - the quantity of mediocre links (good) or the duplicate content around them (bad)? 3. Should we sacrifice SEO for a good business idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erangalp0 -
Google Places Duplicate Listings
Hey Mozzers- I know the basic process for handling duplicate listings, but I just want to make sure and ask because this one is a little sensitive. I have a client with a claimed and verified listings page, which is here: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=chambers+and+associates&hl=en&cid=9065936543314453461 There is also another listing (which I have not claimed yet) here: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=dr.+george+chambers&hl=en&cid=14758636806656154330 The first listing has 0 reviews, where the 2nd unverified listing has 12 fantastic 5 star reviews. We can all agree that if I can get these two listings to merge, his general listing will perform much better than it already is (the first listing has about 200 actions per months). So, what is the best way to merge these two without losing any reviews and without suspending my places account? Thanks in advance! Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | itrogers0