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
-
Do search engine consider this duplicate or thin content?
I operate an eCommerce site selling various equipment. We get product descriptions and various info from the manufacturer's websites offered to the dealers. Part of that info is in the form of User Guides and Operational Manuals downloaded in pdf format written by the manufacturer, then uploaded to our site. Also we embed and link to videos that are hosted on the manufacturer's respective YouTube or Vimeo channels. This is useful content for our customers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelFactor
My questions are: Does this type of content help our site by offering useful info, or does it hurt our SEO due to it being thin and or duplicate content? Or does the original content publishers get all the benefit? Is there any benefit to us publishing this stuff? What exactly is considered "thin content"?0 -
URL Capitalization Inconsistencies Registering Duplicate Content Crawl Errors
Hello, I have a very large website that has a good amount of "Duplicate Content" issues according to MOZ. In reality though, it is not a problem with duplicate content, but rather a problem with URLs. For example: http://acme.com/product/features and http://acme.com/Product/Features both land on the same page, but MOZ is seeing them as separate pages, therefor assuming they are duplicates. We have recently implemented a solution to automatically de-captialize all characters in the URL, so when you type acme.com/Products, the URL will automatically change to acme.com/products – but MOZ continues to flag multiple "Duplicate Content" issues. I noticed that many of the links on the website still have the uppercase letters in the URL even though when clicked, the URL changes to all lower case. Could this be causing the issue? What is the best way to remove the "Duplicate Content" issues that are not actually duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Magento Duplicate Content Recovery
Hi, we switched platforms to Magento last year. Since then our SERPS rankings have declined considerably (no sudden drop on any Panda/Penguin date lines). After investigating, it appeared we neglected to No index, follow all our filter pages and our total indexed pages rose sevenfold in a matter of weeks. We have since fixed the no index issue and the pages indexed are now below what we had pre switch to Magento. We've seen some positive results in the last week. Any ideas when/if our rankings will return? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonnygeeuk0 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Diagnosing duplicate content issues
We recently made some updates to our site, one of which involved launching a bunch of new pages. Shortly afterwards we saw a significant drop in organic traffic. Some of the new pages list similar content as previously existed on our site, but in different orders. So our question is, what's the best way to diagnose whether this was the cause of our ranking drop? My current thought is to block the new directories via robots.txt for a couple days and see if traffic improves. Is this a good approach? Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1 -
Does duplicate content on a sub-domain affect the rankings of root domain?
We recently moved a community website that we own to our main domain. It now lives on our website as a sub-domain. This new sub-domain has a lot of duplicate page titles. We are going to clean it up but it's huge project. (We had tried to clean it even before migrating the community website) I am wondering if this duplicate content on the new sub-domain could be hurting rankings of our root domain? How does Google treat it? From SEO best practices, I know duplicate content within site is always bad. How severe is it given the fact that it is present on a different sub-domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0 -
Does a mobile site count as duplicate content?
Are there any specific guidelines that should be followed for setting up a mobile site to ensure it isn't counted as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0