Is reported duplication on the pages or their canonical pages?
-
There are several sections getting flagged for duplication on one of our sites:
http://mysite.com/section-1/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-2/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-3/?something=X&confirmed=trueEach of the above are showing as having duplicates of the other sections. Indeed, these pages are exactly the same (it's just an SMS confirmation page you enter your code in), however, they all have canonical links back to the section (without the query string), i.e. section-1, section-2 and section-3 respectively.
These three sections have unique content and aren't flagged up for duplications themselves, so my questions are:
Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates, and if so why are the canonical links being ignored?
or
Are the canonical pages without the query strings the duplicates, and if so why don't they appear as URLs in their own right in the duplicate content report?
I am guessing it's the former, but I can't figure out why it would ignore the canonical links. Any ideas?
Thanks
-
This is good news sugar-coating bad news
Thanks!
-
Hi,
The URLs that are reported by the crawl as being duplicates are the duplicate pages. Unfortunately the way the crawl from SEOMoz works, it does not factor the rel=canonical tag when reporting duplicates. In other words, even with the tag implemented, it will still report these pages as duplicates. Don't worry though, as long as the tag is implemented, the search engines should treat the canonical like a 301 redirect and not penalise you for duplicate content.
So to answer your question:
Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates? - Yes.
Hope that helps,
Adam
-
Hey,
It's kind of tricky to answer this without seeing at least two of the category pages but I am guessing that the duplication is in the category pages themselves and if they are simply very thin pages with little to differentiate category A from category B then there is your problem.
Rather than look at the web tool, if you export the spreadsheet this is a lot easier to understand and for each page there is a duplication column which has a comma separated list of the pages that are being flagged as possible duplicates so this should answer your question.
What to do though?
I may be telling you how to suck eggs but this is always a good read when it comes to thin content problems and solutions:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-contentIf it was me, and these pages are thin, but that is the way they are supposed to be, and they are not really search landing pages then there is a good argument to noindex them and remove the possibility of them causing you any problems. If you do this, next time the campaign tool crawls your site they will be ignored and will not show up as a possible duplicate.
Obviously, from a Panda perspective, if these pages are listed as thin, they could be damaging other pages on the site so it is certainly an issue worth addressing.
Hope this helps!
Marcus
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
-
On-page SEO
This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?
On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh1 -
Should you do on-page optimization for a page with rel=canonical tag?
If you ad a rel=canonical tag to a page, should you still optimize that page? I'm talking meta description, page title, etc.
On-Page Optimization | | marynau0 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Renamed a page and created a 301, page lost its rankings.
We changed a page name to fall under the root of our site from domain.com/page1/page301d/ to domain.com/page301d/ and after 2 weeks it still is not back to its #3 position. Now it is on the bottom of page 3. I cant figure out what im doing wrong here. The original .com/page1/ that this page fell under was removed totally and redirected to antoher page that was more relevant. I went ahead and re-enabled this page and its contnent, because the page was linking out to the page we 301d. This page we re-enabled had about 150 links poitning to it and therefore i was thinking that maybe the link juice from this page (or relevancy) via an internal link was helping it rank. This was updated about 6 days ago and the internal link is back Any other ideas why this might not be working. Ive checked all the 301s, content has not changed on the page. We have updated the strcuture for many pages. Instead of having the pages in question fall under anotehr page, they all fall under the root and its sub content is now only 2 levels deep , instead of being 3. hope that makese sense.
On-Page Optimization | | waqid0 -
I'm using Canonical URL but still receiving message - Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Hello, I checked my site and it looks like everything is setup correctly for canonical url but I keep getting the message that it's not. Am I doing something wrong? SORRY I FIGURED IT OUT! THANK YOU! HOW DO I DELETE THIS?
On-Page Optimization | | seohlp440 -
On Page reports is empty
Hello, Yesterday I created my PRO account, I have several urls in top 50 instead of a have no report in On Page Reports, how low take the system for generating this? Thank you, Carlos
On-Page Optimization | | cahams0 -
Duplicate Content Again
Hello Good People. I know that this is another duplicate post about duplicate content (boring) but i am going crazy with this.. SeoMoz crawl and other tools tells me that i have a duplicate content between site root and index.html. The site is www.sisic-product.com i am going crazy with this... the server is IIS so cannot use htaccess please help... thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Makumbala0 -
Are these considered duplicates?
http://www.domain.com/blog/sample-blog-post/#more-0001 http://www.domain.com/blog/sample-blog-post/ The first URL is coming from a "click here" hyperlink from the excerpt of the 2nd URL in my homepage. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | esiow20130