SEO Mox reporting all pages & titles as duplicate, but this is not the case.
-
HI, I am confused . This week SEOMoz is reporting that all my pages and pages titles are duplicate. This is not the case. I have added geo meta tags to each page - could this be causing the duplicate page content condition? I have no theory about the title duplicate condition. I have uploaded pdfs of these seomoz reports here: http://www.2shared.com/document/JAgS2Ni9/Issue_-Duplicate_Page_Content.html http://www.2shared.com/document/gyXcMsoP/Issue-Duplicate_Page_Title-.html Help please. thanks.
-
Rel canonical is definitely NOT the preferred way to handle this kind of situation, IMO, Zach. Best practice is to run the 301 redirect to give the Search Engines (and users!) the clearest message as to the Fully Qualified Domain.
This isn't a matter of the 2 URLs needing to exist, which is when you use rel canonical. The second variation serves no possible useful purpose, so should be redirected in order to get rid of it altogether.( In my experience, rel canonical also doesn't seem to reliably pass page influence the way 301s do.)
For example, by doing the redirect, the URL will always appear in the address bar as the www version, so if someone copies that address, they'll always end up using the canonical FQDN.
That said, Richard, you can also use Google Webmaster Tools to tell the Search Engines that you want your www version to be considered canonical. It's just one more way of signalling to them.
Once this is working, you're going to want to be very careful to always use the FQDN yuorself - ie always write links using the full www.weddingdancelessons.co.uk, whether on your own site or when you're getting links back to yourself.
-
That new rule won't catch all the related subpages, Richard.
Here's the standard version I use - give it a shot, then test it.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^weddingdancelessons.com.au$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au$1 [R=301,L]Paul
-
yes thanks.
I already had:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^weddingdancelessons.com.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/" [R=301,L]in my .htaccess file but these errors as per the ref you provided. So I am not sure if this is working.
Would
Redirect 301 http://weddingdancelessons.com.au http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au
solve the problem ?
-
I think you should continue looking at doing a 301 redirect instead.
You can use the canonical tag, but you should do so in cases where you intend to have different URLs for one main page (e.g. www.example.com/blue-widget.html, www.example.com/widgets/blue-widget.html). Here is a another question regarding canonicals where Ryan Kent provides a good explanation for this.
You can learn more about 301 redirecting here. Yoast also provides some information for how to do it here.
-
Thanks Paul,
so would this be the correct syntax in line 1 of .htacess file?
Redirect 301 http://weddingdancelessons.com.au http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au
Thanks.
-
We literally just wrote on the same error
I ran through screaming frog, and there is definitely duplicate content because of non-canonical URLs.
-
Hello Richard, I just ran your site through a tool called screaming frog, which instantly crawls your site and allows me to view errors such as duplicate titles and the like. Here is what happened, when Screaming Frog, and SEOmoz crawls your site, they see both URLS: http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html http://weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html Both have the same title: "Wedding Dance Lessons Sydney | Dancing Lessons to couples to learn their first dance and to look confident at their wedding." Even though to humans there is little deliniaton between the two, it is exteremely important to search engines. The solution to this is to use the rel="cannonical" tag check out this blog post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not, it's dated but still relevant to your case. Once all of your pages have that tag, your SEO issues should resolve themselves
Please let me know if you have any more questions Zach
-
As near as I can tell, Richard, the crawl is reporting the issue because you don't have canonicalization of the primary domain of the website. Big words to mean that your site is resolving at both www.weddingdancelessons.com.au and weddingdancelessons.com.au (without the www)
Search Engines and therefore Mozbot will see these as two different sets of pagesx, therefore duplicating each other.
If you look down the list of pages reported, you'll see that some are listed with the www and some without.
What should happen is that one of those two versions is 301-redirected to the other. Best practice is usually to redirect the non-www to the www version, although it can be worth double-checking which version has more incoming links/page authority before making the final choice.
Since this looks like it's just happened, it may be that there have been changes made to the .htaccess file that have messed up previous settings, or it may be that the crawler just caught the dupes this time.
Paul
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
-
Pages with Duplicate Content
When I crawl my site through moz, it shows lots of Pages with Duplicate Content. The thing is all that pages are pagination pages. How should I solve this issue?
Technical SEO | | 100offdeal0 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Duplicate Titles on Wordpress blog pages
Hi, I have an issue where I am getting for duplicate page titles for pages that shouldn't exist. The issue is on the blog index page's (from 0 - 16) and involves the same set of attachment_id for each page, i.e. /blog/page/10/?attachment_id=minack /blog/page/10/?attachment_id=ponyrides /blog/page/11/?attachment_id=minack /blog/page/11/?attachment_id=ponyrides There are 6 attachment_id values (and they are not ID values either) which repeat for every page on the index now what I can't work out is where those 6 links are coming from as on the actual blog index page http://www.bosinver.co.uk/blog/page/10/ there are no links to it and the links just go to blog index page and it ignores the attachment_id value. There is no sitemap.xml file either which I thought might have contained the links. Thanks
Technical SEO | | leapSEO0 -
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 -
Will using tabs on my page for navigation hurt SEO
Currently we have tabs on some pages that are set so that the page shows all the content for search engines on one page, but the user sees only part of the content until they click a tab. We are unable to use title tags for the tabbed areas. We think this hurts us from an SEO standpoint. We are getting only 3 keyword where we could have 12 if they were individual pages. What is the thought on using tabs and is it okay? Has there been any case studies on this?
Technical SEO | | cayseo0 -
Uservoice and Duplicate Page Content
Hello All, I'm having an issue where the my UserVoice account is creating duplicate page content (image attached). Any ideas on how to resolve the problem? A couple solutions we're looking into: moving the uservoice content inside the app, so it won't get crawled, but that's all we got for now. Thank you very much for your time any insight would be helpful. Sincerely,
Technical SEO | | JonnyBird1
Jon Birdsong SalesLoft duplicate duplicate0 -
How do I fix this type of duplicate page content problem?
Sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Content URLs Internal Links External Links Page Authority Linking Root Domains http://rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html 30 0 26 1 http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html 30 0 20 1 http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/ | 1,630 | 613 | 43 | 110 | As you can see there are three duplicate pages; http://rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/ What would be the best and most efficient way to fix this problem and also how to prevent this from happening? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | brianhughes0 -
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. i9G89.png
Technical SEO | | pixel830