Testing for duplicate content and title tags
-
Hi there,
I have been getting both Duplicate Page content and Duplicate Title content warnings on my crawl diagnostics report for one of my campaigns. I did my research, and implemented the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools. This did not resolve the crawl diagnostics warnings, and upon further research I discovered the preferred domain would only be noted by Google and not other bots like Roger. My only issue was that when I ran an SEOmoz crawl test on the same domain, I saw none of the duplicate content or title warnings yet they still appear on my crawl diagnostics report. I have now implemented a fix in my .htaccess file to 301 redirect to the www. domain. I want to check if it's worked, but since the crawl test did not show the issue last time I don't think I can rely on that. Can you help please?
Thanks,
Claire
-
Thanks Joseph. Very helpful.
-
Hello Claire,
I really don't think you are going to get those errors show up on the next crawl.
Just on another note after seeing your URL...
I would also code all of the links in the site with full absolute links.
I see the links as
<li> href=" /our-services/diabetes-support/get-started/"> Diabetes Supporta>li> I would add the **http://www.** in front of all those links.
-
Thanks Jared, that's awesome.
-
You can always check by testing in your browser but the best way is to check the header response to make sure the server is sending the proper response (a 301) - your landing pages look good (see below). I use Live HTTP Headers which is a firefox plugin - hers what it tell you:
http://pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross-village/
GET /our-pharmacies/applecross-village/ HTTP/1.1
Host: pharmacy777.com.au
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2012 03:23:17 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)
Location: http://www.pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross-village/So the redirect is working. The only thing i noticed was that the home page instantly switched to www and didnt even return a 301 so it appears you may have implemented a redirect there outside of htaccess.
If your report is still showing duplicates make sure that its not the trailing slash. Your URLs can be loaded as such:
http://www.pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross/
http://www.pharmacy777.com.au/our-pharmacies/applecross
The best way to find out if the SEOMoz report is counting these as dupes is to Export the crawl report to CSV (top right of crawl report). Then go all the way to the far right column called 'duplicate pages' and sort it alphabetically. This column will show you all of the duplicate urls for each particular URL row. Lots of times you can find little 'surprises' here - that csv report is priceless!
-
Hi Joseph,
Yes, I have done this test and it appears to be working. I just want to be sure I'm not going to be faced with a load of warnings when my next crawl runs on the weekend, as when I implemented the Webmaster preferred domain what happened was"
-
implemented preferred domain
-
rank crawl test - looked to have resolved the issue but then
-
4 days later the scheduled crawl report ran, all errors still present.
Luckily I told the client I had to wait for the report results and didn't tell think it was resolved after the crawl test looked OK!! This time I've run the crawl test and done the manual test you suggested, but I want to be able to feed back to the client today if I can (confidently), and I no longer trust the test.
Thanks very much for your answer, it's always good to have someone validate your own approach.
Cheers,
Claire
-
-
-
If I understand correctly you want to see if your re-direct has fixed your duplicate content issue.
Right now you still get the error ...
I would simply type the url in the address bar, with and without the www. and see if both show up.
If the re - direct is working then only one should show up , the other should re - direct immediately.
If they both show up do then your .htaccess code may have a mistake.
hope that helps.
-
Update: Reporting can be historic - so you are probably looking at a report from an older crawl.
-
Hi Claire - we need the url of your site to check the headers on the 301 redirect!
Definitely a good way to fix this is via htaccess like you are suggesting you did. When I get a new client its in the campaign startup list and it works well. Make sure there arent any other issues like the infamous trailing slash causing duplication. If you provide the URL a quick check can be made.
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
-
Crawl Diagnostics: Duplicate Content Issues
The Moz crawl diagnostic is showing that I have some duplicate content issues on my site. For the most part, these are variations of the same product that are listed individually (i.e size/color). What would be the best way to deal with this? Choose one variation of the product and add a canonical tag? Thanks
Technical SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Duplicate Title Tags
Webmaster Tools is showing that I have 78 duplicate title tags. Here is an example of tags they deem to be duplicate: www.lifeinsure.com/blog/life-insurance-trusts/ www.lifeinsure.com/blog/life-insurance-trusts www.lifeinsure.com/life-insurance-trusts/ I have done 301 redirects from any posts beginning with "/blog/" to "/" Any idea why this is happening?
Technical SEO | | rdreich490 -
Duplicate Content - Reverse Phone Directory
Hi, Until a few months ago, my client's site had about 600 pages. He decided to implement what is essentially a reverse phone directory/lookup tool. There are now about 10,000 reverse directory/lookup pages (.html), all with short and duplicate content except for the phone number and the caller name. Needless to say, I'm getting thousands of duplicate content errors. Are there tricks of the trade to deal with this? In nosing around, I've discovered that the pages are showing up in Google search results (when searching for a specific phone number), usually in the first or second position. Ideally, each page would have unique content, but that's next to impossible with 10,000 pages. One potential solution I've come up with is incorporating user-generated content into each page (maybe via Disqus?), which over time would make each page unique. I've also thought about suggesting that he move those pages onto a different domain. I'd appreciate any advice/suggestions, as well as any insights into the long-term repercussions of having so many dupes on the ranking of the 600 solidly unique pages on the site. Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | sally580 -
404 and Duplicate Content.
I just submitted my first campaign. And it's coming up with a LOT of errors. Many of them I feel are out of my control as we use a CMS for RV dealerships. But I have a couple of questions. I got a 404 error and SEO Moz tells me the link, but won't tell me where that link originated from, so I don't know where to go to fix it. I also got a lot of duplicate content, and it seems a lot of them are coming from "tags" on my blog. Is that something I should be concerned about? I will have a lot more question probably as I'm new to using this tool Thanks for the responses! -Brandon here is my site: floridaoutdoorsrv.com I welcome any advice or input!
Technical SEO | | floridaoutdoorsrv0 -
Duplicate Title/Meta Descriptions
Hi I had some error messages in the webmaster account, stating I had duplicate title/meta descriptions. Ive since fixed it, typically how long does it take for a full crawl if Ive fixed these issues? Webmaster is still showing problems with various Title/Descriptions. Also was wondering if I should block individual pages on a large ecomerce site? EX of a Large site - http://www.stubhub.com/chicago-bears-tickets/ (Page is structure and optimized) Then you have all individual games http://www.stubhub.com/chicago-bears-tickets/bears-vs-lions-soldier-field-4077064/ they have an H1 and a meta description, should the page above be blocked from google and concentrate only on the Pain page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Duplicate content + wordpress tags
According to SEOMoz platform, one of my wordpress websites deals with duplicate content because of the tags I use. How should I fix it? Is it loyal to remove tag links from the post pages?
Technical SEO | | giankar0 -
Duplicate content on my home
Hello, I have duplication with my home page. It comes in two versions of the languages: French and English. http://www.numeridanse.tv/fr/ http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/ You should know that the home page are not directories : http://www.numeridanse.tv/ Google indexes the three versions: http://bit.ly/oqKT0H To avoid duplicating what is the best solution?
Technical SEO | | android_lyon
Have a version of the default language? Thanks a lot for your answers. Take care. A.0 -
Is this considered as duplicate content?
One of my clients has a template page they have used repeatedly each time they have a new news item. The template includes a two-paragraph customer quote/testimonial for the company. So, they now have 100+ pages with the same customer quote. The rest of the page content / body copy is unique. Is there any likelihood of this being considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110