Duplicate page titles in SEOMoz

[InetAll]

My on page reports are showing a good number of duplicate title tags, but they are all because of a url tracking parameter that tells us which link the visitor clicked on. For example, http://www.example.com/example-product.htm?ref=navside and http://www.example.com/example-product.htm are the same page, but are treated as to different urls in SEOMoz. This is creating "fake" number of duplicate page titles in my reports.

This has not been a problem with Google, but SEOMoz is treating it like this and it's confusing my data. Is there a way to specify this as a url parameter in the Moz software?

Or does anybody have another suggestion? Should I specify this in GWT and BWT?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The best way to handle this, for all crawlers including Google, Yahoo and Moz, is to make sure you have proper canonical tags on those URLs that point to the non-parameterized URL.

So http://www.example.com/example-product.htm?ref=navside will have a canonical that points to http://www.example.com/example-product.htm

[Cyrus-Shepard]

My understanding is that the Moz crawlers should be checking the canonical, in which case it will ignore duplicate content and title tag issues. If you find this is not the case with your crawl, please let our help team know at help @ moz.com

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

No, Moz's tool won't check the canonical to see if that would ignore this.

[planetargon]

Do you think that setting a canonical url tag might help fix this?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Robert,

Yes, I'm sorry but you're overlooking something. Ignoring parameters is something you should do in regards to SEO. It won't stop Google Analytics tracking these parameters.

[planetargon]

I'm not sure why I'd want to ask google to ignore those parameters... we're explicitly adding the ones that they suggested we use from here:

• https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

The issue that I'm having is that Moz analytics is showing duplicate pages as an issue to resolve when the only difference is that these params exist.

Am I overlooking something here?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Robert,

I wouldn't handle this via robots.txt if you only want to do this for Rogerbot. The best way to tell Google to ignore your UTM parameters is via Google Webmaster Tools. Under Crawl > URL Parameters you've got the option to add parameters that don't change any of the content and are solely used for tracking purposes.

[planetargon]

I'm having a similar issue. Is there an example of how to add this to the robots.txt file to ignore the utm stuff for RogerBot?

Our scenario is that we send out PDFs with links to pages on our site and those links have utm parameters included... and are showing up as duplicate content.

Thanks in advance,

Robby

[InetAll]

I think this is the answer I was looking for... Yeah,  GWT already has a bunch of our parameters added, and hasn't had a problem with this one. It's not showing these pages as duplicate like SEOMoz does.

Thanks guys!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

What you might want to do to get rid of this issues within SEOMoz is add the parameters to your robots.txt file and specifically target the user agent of SEOMoz: Rogerbot. This way SEOMoz won't crawl the links with this parameter and by doing that also won't warn you about these duplicate titles.

Hope this helps!

Btw. As James already mentioned I would also recommend to configure these parameters within Google Webmaster Tools.

[jws8118]

You could set it up in GWT but it sounds like you are using utm tags on internal links so you can see which physical links on a page are driving clicks.  If that's the case a cleaner solution is to upgrade your Google Analytics code for enhanced link attribution. I'm assuming you are using GA but if so this will allow you to see which links are driving which clicks and won't create tons of duplicate page titles in SEOmoz.

See link:  http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2558867

Let me know if you have questions,

JS