Showing Duplicate Content in Webmaster Tools.
-
About 6 weeks ago we completely redid our entire site. The developer put in 302 redirects. We were showing thousands of duplicate meta descriptions and titles. I had the redirects changed to 301. For a few weeks the duplicates slowly went down and now they are right back to where they started. Isn't the point of 301 redirects to show Google that content has permanently been moved? Why is it not picking this up? I knew it would take some time but I am right where I started after a month.
-
The site has been around for over 10 years, and we do not have any noindex. I am starting to see it drop but two months seems like a long time to start seeing changes.
-
It shouldn't be duplicate but for some reason it is. We did entirely new tags and descriptions for everything. It recently dropped a little more so I hope we are moving into the right direction.
-
Yea, 3000 pages will take a while.
The title tags and meta descriptions are all new, does that mean it is different from the old pages? If it is, then it shouldn't be duplicate.
-
Hmm... not totally sure on why only half of your sitemap is being indexed. Likely its a mixture of a number of factors including (but not limited to) site age, NoIndex tags, Google not crawling deep enough, lack of inbound links to deep pages, etc. etc. From what I've seen though, Google will eventually get to all/most of the pages in your sitemap and will eventually swap out your older pages for the 301'd/canonicalized pages that you want showing in the SERPs. Take into account some of the other tips people are sharing here because it may be a mix of our suggestions that will ultimately work for you.
-
We have the sitemap setup ok. For some reason only 50% of my sitemap is being indexed. Any ideas?
-
Okay, in that case I wouldn't suggest manually fetching and submitting 3000 links one by one because that would be a complete waste of time. You could always make sure to update your sitemap and then add that in Optimization>Sitemap or choose to Resubmit the current sitemap (hoping that that will lead to Google re-crawling sooner) and/or fetch some changed pages and submit to index as "URL and all linked pages".
Otherwise I'd say wait... SEO is a long-term job. It's only been 6 weeks since you re-did your site and less than that since you switched everything over from 302s to 301s. Give it some more time and you'll see Google start showing the correct pages and removing any unnecessary duplicate content warnings.
-
There are over 3000 for both meta descriptions and titles so to remove individually could take some time.
The title tag and meta descriptions are all new. We did completely new ones when we redid the site.
We checked and they are all 301's instead of 302s. Originally they were 302s but we changed that. It start dropping steadily and was down to about 1300. But all of a sudden it jumped back up to 3000 some, exactly what I was at before. So I am back to square one.
-
I have over 3000 in both meta descriptions and titles so that might take awhile.
-
I have over 3000 in both meta descriptions and titles so that might take awhile.
-
Hi,
I had a similar problem but i found duplicate title tags through another tool but very similar to Google Webmasters. Although you did 301 redirects to new pages and thats the right thing to do but I believe from that tool, they are still picking up the title tag and meta descriptions from the old pages. I also don't know why. There are two ways to approach this.
-
Go to your old pages and simply remove all the title tags and meta descriptions
-
Go to your new pages and change the title tag and meta description. Optimize it even more than what you used to have on your old pages. Add secondary keywords to the title tag? Change up the meta description with CTA?
Maybe you should also check to make sure that all of them are 301 redirects and not 302. Furthermore, do you have www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com? These are considered two different sites and might be the reason.
Hope this helps.
-
-
Sometimes it can take a while for Google to show things correctly in the SERPs and for a time you may wind up with duplication warnings because there is the older, cached page still showing in the index along with the new page that the older one redirects to. In cases like this I usually jump into webmaster tools, fetch the old page (which I know redirects to the new one) and do a crawl request/submit to index to ensure that Google sees it and indexes it correctly sooner than it may have naturally. Now, I'm not 100% certain that it will fix your issue but I can say that it can potentially help and can't do any harm in this instance.
-
They all render the same page. One goes to the page it is supposed to and the other redirects to the correct page. This is the behavior I want to happen.
-
First you need to check if multiple URLs displayed under each title are working and rendering different pages.
Sometimes redirect may have syntax issues. Post your result to discuss other options.
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
-
Duplicate Content Question With New Domain
Hey Everyone, I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content. Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet. The Issue Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc). Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny0 -
Google Webmaster Tools Parameters
We have several large ecommerce websites, and we've added some tracking parameters to GWT for google to ignore. All pages are correctly canonicaled. Google has been ignoring the parameters and the canonicals, and still ranks many parametered pages for us. Has anyone run into this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Product Syndication and duplicate content
Hi, It's a duplicate content question. We sell products (vacation rental homes) on a number of websites as well as our own. Generally, these affiliate sites have a higher domain authority and much more traffic than our site. The product content (text, images, and often availability and rates) is pulled by our affiliates into their websites daily and is exactly the same as the content on our site, not including their page structure. We receive enquiries by email and any links from their domains to ours are nofollow. For example, all of the listing text on mysite.com/listing_id is identical to my-first-affiliate-site.com/listing_id and my-second-affiliate-site.com/listing_id. Does this count as duplicate content and, if so, can anyone suggest a strategy to make the best of the situation? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin0 -
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 do I add https version of site to Bing webmaster tools?
I could add my site to Google Webmaster tools with no problems, but when I try to add it in Bing webmaster tools it just redirects me to what I already have. Everything is staying the same but the switch from http to https. Anyone else experienced this? This is what I just received back from Bing and it doesn't seem right- I understand that you switched to the https version of your site and you're now trying to use the Site Move tool. However, in order to do this, you must verify the https version of your site first. You cannot do this because it just redirects you to the dashboard. We thank you for reporting this to us. We've investigated on this matter and can see that you're already put a redirect from the http to the https version of your site. We also checked the /BingSiteAuth.xml file and this also redirects to the https version. At this point, we suggest that you remove the current website (http version) that is verified through Bing Webmaster Tool and add your https domain. When done, use the Site Move tool. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite1 -
Question regarding geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools.
I understand that it's possible to target both domains/subdomains and subfolders to different geographical regions in GWT. However, I was wondering about the effect of targeting the domain to a single country, say the UK. Then targeting subfolders to other regions (say the US and France). e.g. www.domain.com -> UK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TranslateMediaLtd
www.domain.com/us -> US
www.domain.com/fr -> France etc Would it be better to leave the main domain without a geographical target but set geo-targeting for the subfolders? Or would it be best to set geo-targeting for both the domain and subfolders.0 -
Is all duplication of HTML title content bad?
In light of Hummingbird and that HTML titles are the main selling point in SERPs, is my approach to keyword rich HTML titles bad? Where possible I try to include the top key phrase to descripe a page and then a second top keyphrase describing what the company/ site as a whole is or does. For instance an estate agents site could consist of HTML title such as this Buy Commercial Property in Birmingham| Commercial Estate Agents Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Commercial Estate Agents In order to preserve valuable characters I have also been omitting brand names other than on the home page... is this also poor form?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SoundinTheory0 -
Google consolidating link juice on duplicate content pages
I've observed some strange findings on a website I am diagnosing and it has led me to a possible theory that seems to fly in the face of a lot of thinking: My theory is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
When google see's several duplicate content pages on a website, and decides to just show one version of the page, it at the same time agrigates the link juice pointing to all the duplicate pages, and ranks the 1 duplicate content page it decides to show as if all the link juice pointing to the duplicate versions were pointing to the 1 version. EG
Link X -> Duplicate Page A
Link Y -> Duplicate Page B Google decides Duplicate Page A is the one that is most important and applies the following formula to decide its rank. Link X + Link Y (Minus some dampening factor) -> Page A I came up with the idea after I seem to have reverse engineered this - IE the website I was trying to sort out for a client had this duplicate content, issue, so we decided to put unique content on Page A and Page B (not just one page like this but many). Bizarrely after about a week, all the Page A's dropped in rankings - indicating a possibility that the old link consolidation, may have been re-correctly associated with the two pages, so now Page A would only be getting Link Value X. Has anyone got any test/analysis to support or refute this??0