Duplicate url problem causing me problems
-
Hi, i am working with a joomla site and i am using the sh404sef plugin. I have contacted the developer of the plugin who has not been very helpful so i am hoping to get help here.
The problem i am having is, the description of the page showing in google listings is not the same as what i have put into the meta tag description.
for example, for this page
http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy
the meta tag description should be
Gastric Band Hypnotherapy to lose weight guaranteed. Free Gastric Band Hypnosis Consultations with Well Known Gastric Hypno Band expert as seen on TV. Hypno Gastric Band Works. We offer full support after your Gastric Band Hypnotherapy
but in google it is showing
Gastric Band Hypnotherapy Works. If you would like a slimmer and healthier body with all the benefits of weight loss surgery without any of the risks that can be ...
now one thing i have noticed is: in the sh404sef control panel, i have noticed that i have the following
index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=190&id=153&lang=en&view=article
the above is the original url from day one but then i have the one below which is not the original
index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=190&catid=150&id=153&lang=en&view=article
i keep deleting the above which is not the original but it keeps coming back and i have been told this could be the fault
can anyone please help me with this and solve how to stop it from coming back so google shows the correct description please.
-
I'm not an expert with Joomla by any means, but based on your original post you seem confidant as to what the description tag should be, but then its not showing up in the actual code, so I feel like something with your Joomla setup isn't working. Or possibly you have two plugins that are conflicting with one another?
-
hi, really do not understand, can you explain more please
-
Hey Diane, Just following up on Richards post, but I'm guessing theres something bigger going on with your Joomla plugins because your description tag is blank. I checked both of the "non pretty" url's and they are both directing to the same page with the same blank description. So I would be looking for a missing checkbox somewhere in the setup for this particular page.
-
Hi Diane, just seen you are a 'journeyman' status so apologies if its likely to me my previous comment was simply telling you what you already know!
Best of luck in finding a fix,
RIchard
-
Hi Diane
Looking at page you mention I cannot see a meta description - its blank - therefore Google has no choice but to try and pick the most appropriate words from the page.
Bear in mind their is no guarantee Google will display the meta description - it will either pick the description or copy from the page - depending on which it thinks is most appropriate for your search.
On its own the meta description does not influence your position, however by being a powerful marketing message opportunity the better written ones may get more clicks... so being more popular may improve the position.
Sorry I dont know my way around Joomla so others are better to help you with the exact fix however hope the above may help in the direction you go.
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
-
Can you help by advising how to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my website please?
Stopping a redirect from one URL to another due to a 404 error? Referred URL which is (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/%5Bnull%20id=43484%5D) Referring URL (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/)
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Duplicate content analysis
Hi all,We have some pages being flagged as duplicates by the google search console. However, we believe the content on these pages is distinctly different (for example, they have completely different search results returned, different headings etc). An example of two pages google finds to be duplicates is below. if anyone can spot what might be causing the duplicate issue here, would very much appreciate suggestions! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
Examples: https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/IFA-financial-advisor-mortgage/harborne
https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/accountant/harborne0 -
Single URL not indexed
Hi everyone! Some days ago, I noticed that one of our URLs (http://www.access.de/karriereplanung/webinare) is no longer in the Google index. We never had any form of penalty, link warning etc. Our traffic by Google is constantly growing every month. This single page does not have an external link pointing to it - only internal links. The page has been indexed all the time. The HTTP status code is 200, there is no noindex or something in the code. I submitted the URL on GWMT to let Google send it to the index. It was crawled successfully by Google, sent to the index 5 days ago - nothing happened, still not indexed. Do you have any suggestions why this page is no longer indexed? It is well linked internally and one click away from the home page. There is still the PR of 5 showing, I always thought that pages with PR are indexed.......
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Structure of urls
**Hallo from Athens, Greece. We have to implement the following project and i need your help: ** We will build a company guide for the whole country and company local guides for each city for the same client. **Information of the country guide is the sum of information of local guides, so when a user is at the country guide he sees information from companies from all cities and when the user is at city guide he sees info only for the city. ** The problem is the structure of the url we should have. Should the page of presentation of each company should have structure as domain.gr/id/company? or city.domain.gr/id/company and the one to be canonical to the other? is this good for seo? Should both urls be included in the sitemap? Thank you
Technical SEO | | herculesopa0 -
Duplicate content by php id,page=... problem
Hi dear friends! How can i resolve this duplicate problem with edit the php code file? My trouble is google find that : http://vietnamfoodtour.com/?mod=booking&act=send_booking&ID=38 and http://vietnamfoodtour.com/.....booking.html are different page, but they are one but google indexed both of them. And the Duplcate content is raised 😞 how can i notice to google that they are one?
Technical SEO | | magician0 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Different URLS for our multi language pages caused penalty?
Hi all, We have a website www.phoneboxlanguage.com with 4 different language versions (Spanish, French, Italian, German). We have all the different versions on totally different URLS. E.G the French URL is www.cours-telephone-anglais.com. Recently this month we saw a huge drop in SERPS for all the 'foreign' language pages. This had happened before for the Spanish and French, which we put down to keyword density issues, so created new URLS for those pages. However now all 4 foreign pages have dropped. Could this be due instead to a penalty for duplicate sites? The content is obviously different due to different languages, but the coding and templates for the sites are the same. How can we find out this is the case and what should we do? I was thinking after some research on the forum to create subfolders in the original (phoneboxlanguage.com) and then create 301 redirects, from the old dropped sites, or would their penalties be bad for our original site, if this were the case? We are obviously very keen to not further damage the site and the original site which remains o.k. Many thanks for your kind help. Quime.
Technical SEO | | Quime0 -
Product ratings causing 302 redirect problem
I am working on an ecommerce site and my crawl report came back with 7000+ 302 redirects and maxed out at 10,000 pages because of all the redirects. The site really only has maybe 1500 pages (dynamic content aside). After looking into it a little more I see it is because of the product rating system. They have a star rating system that kinda looks like amazons. The only problem is that each star is a link to a dynamic address that records the vote and then 302's back to the original page the vote was cast from. So virtually every page on this site links out anywhere from 15 to 45 times and 302's back to itself, losing virtually all of its PR. Am I correct in that assumption or am I missing something? I don't see the links being blocked by robots.txt or noindex, nofollowed. Also it is an anonymous rating system where a rating can be cast from any category page displaying a product or any product page. To make matters worse every page links to a printable version which duplicates the issue by repeating the whole thing over again. So assuming I am correct that is site has a major PR leak on virtually every page, what is the best recommendation to fix this. 1. Block all of those links in robots.txt, 2. no index, nofollow these links or 3. put the rating system behind a submit button or disallow anon ratings 4. something else??? Looking at their product ratings on the site virtually everything is between 2-3 starts out of 5 and has about the same number of votes except less votes on deeper pages. I dont believe this is real at all since this site gets almost no traffic and maybe 1 sale a week, there is no way that any product has been rated 50 times. I think the crawler is voting as it crawls and doing it 5 times for every product which is why everything is rated 2.5 out of 5. This is an x-cart site in case anyone cares. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb0