Update in Moz spider/tools?? Flagging duplicate content / ignoring canonical
-
Hi all,
Has there been an update in the SEOmoz crawling software?
We now have thousands of dupe content/page title warnings for paginated product page URLs that have correctly formatted canonicals.
e.g.
http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx
... has following pages with identical content that have been flagged:
http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4
..plus 4 more URL's.
But they all have canonical set. There's even a notice at the bottom of report that tells us there's a canonical set to http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx
What gives, SEOmoz ??
Thanks
Michael
-
Hey Lawrence,
Campaigns have a 95% tolerance for duplicate content. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text. So if a URL is at least 95% similar in code and content to another URL, this warning will appear.
You can run your own tests using this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php
We don't know what standard Google uses, but it's safe to say they are a bit more sophisticated than us - so you might be okay in this regard as long as you have a couple hundred words of unique text and some unique coding per page. Google won't say how much duplicate content is too much, so we like to be better safe than sorry.
I hope this help. Let me know if you need further assistance.
-Chiaryn
-
Hi Chiaryn,
Thanks for reply and explanation. The different colour-specific pages e.g. Tweed Green and Olive Green have some different content but it's nothing like enough in cases of two greens, two blues etc. as we simplify colour names for search so when there is an Olive and a Tweed Green they both end up having 'Green' as variable in page title, H1 etc. Will fix this.
Do you think the reviews at the bottom of the pages will also trigger dupe content warning? i.e. even if we make all other on-page elements unique for each colour url? (page title, H1, H2, prod description etc) The reviews are quite extensive and are the same on all the separate colour specific product page versions of each style and was thinking today whether we should remove them from these colour product pages (OR perhaps let the colour product pages have their OWN reviews)
http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx
Thanks again
-
Oh, brilliant (re: "See more" aspect) Thanks for the info. Will let you how we tackle this and the repercussions (!) and look forward to hearing how you get on also!
-
Hi Michael,
Thanks for writing in. I already emailed you in response to the ticket you sent in to the Help Desk, but I will copy my answer here for you review.
--
I looked into your campaign and it seems that this is happening because of where your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example, http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx is considered a duplicate of http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 because the canonical tag for the first page is http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx while the canonical for the second URL ishttp://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx, with one URL showing tweed-green and the other showing olive-green.
Since the canonical tags point to different URLs it is assumed that http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx and http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx are likely to be duplicates themselves.
Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:
Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,
If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
The examples you've provided actually fall into the fourth example I've listed above.I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
--
-Chiaryn
-
We use the "See more" script on our sites, and from what I understand, at least from other Mozzers, this is an okay practice. http://www.seomoz.org/q/using-more-info-javascript-toggledisplay-tag-for-more-info-text
We also use the rel="prev" and rel="next" to some success, but I can't comment on how that's functioning canonical-wise, because IT WAS DROPPED from our latest redesign and is going to be added to our client's website in the latest release. Oye.
I'd love to hear how this works out for you. There are some really great Mozzers on here with loads of experience about canonical tags and duplicate page issues. Can't wait to see what they have to contribute.
-
Hi there,
Thanks for your response.
It's not product page A being seen as a duplicate of product page B etc, but several versions of product A seen as duplicate due to pagination, stemming from reviews for the products that span several pages, so making the rest of the content, titles etc different other than the (crawlable) reviews isn't really an option.
Will look more into "noindex, follow" tags in pagination.
We could have a View All page for indexing showing all reviews (with lots of scrolling!) , with the paginated versions canonicalized to that version (could still serve the paginated version of product page from site navigation perhaps with "noindex, follow" meta tag) Text doesn’t take long to load and this approach would consolidate the review content.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
Other option is to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” implementation which shows Google the relationship between the pages (not sure if it will still be flagged as dupe content in SEOmoz though! Depends if they follow the tag). This way individual pages might get indexed (not sure if that's a good thing?!) perhaps if there's something in a review from (say) page 5 of the product reviews.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Ideally I'd like to implement all reviews on one page and hide them with a facebook-style 'See more' function. Not sure if that counts as hiding content? Will look into this.
-
Hi Michael,
Not sure if this helps you out at all, but I found this about the canonicals and SEOMoz crawl report in a previous Q http://mz.cm/11erRj6:
As far as the SEOmoz crawl reports go, not that setting a canonical won't stop these pages being reported as duplicate content.
From the help:
"Keep in mind that that canonicals will stop the pages from ranking against each other, but they will still show up as duplicate content from a UI perspective, so we will still count them as duplicate."
I have the same issues on my accounts. I'm focusing on making the pages content as unique as possible, or using the "noindex, follow" meta tags to see if that makes a difference.
I know you may have a lot of pages on your website, but perhaps writing short descriptions on your products would help. It might be worthwhile, but completely understandable that it may be a huge undertaking if you have hundreds or thousands of pages.
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/Missing Meta Description | Pages DO NOT EXISIT!
Hello all, For the last few months, Moz has been showing us that our site has roughly 2,000 duplicate content errors. Pages that were actually duplicate content, I took care of accordingly using best practice (301 redirects, canonicalization,etc.). Still remaining after these fixes were errors showing for pages that we have never created. Our homepage is www.primepay.com. An example of pages that are being shown as duplicate content is http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/payroll/online-payroll with a referring page of http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/online-payroll. Some of these are even now showing up as 403 and 404 errors. The only real page on our site within that URL strand is primepay.com/payroll or primepay.com/payroll/online-payroll. Therefore, I am not sure where Moz is getting these pages from. Another issue we are having in relation to duplicate content is that moz is showing old campaign url’s tacked on to our blog page i.e. http://primepay.com/blog?title=&page=2&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogCTA&utm_campaign=IRSblogpost&qt-blog_tabs=1. As of this morning, our duplicate content went from 2,000 to 18,000. I exported all of our crawl diagnostics data and looked to see what the referring pages were, and even they are not pages that we have created. When you click on these links, they take you to a random point in time from the homepage of our blog; some dating back to 2010. I checked our crawl stats in both Google and Bing’s Webmaster tool, and there are no duplicate content or 400 level errors being reporting from their crawl. My team is truly at a loss with trying to resolve this issue and any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | PrimePay0 -
Does Moz have any tools to see the amount of traffic certain keywords bring us in search? Does anyone know any tools that give the actual traffic numbers?
We're looking for numerical data on the amount of traffic that keywords receive, regardless of their rank in Moz. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Scratch-Kony0 -
I have a duplicate content on my Moz crawler, but google hasn't indexed those pages: do I still need to get rid of the tags?
I received an urgent error from the Moz crawler that I have duplicate content on my site due to the tags I have. For example: http://www.1forjustice.com/graves-amendment/ The real article found here: http://www.1forjustice.com/car-accident-rental-car/ I didn't think this was a big deal, because when I looked at my GWT these pages weren't indexed (picture attached). Question: should I bother fixing this from an SEO perspective? If Google isn't indexing the pages, then am I losing link juice? 6c2kxiZ
Moz Pro | | Perenich0 -
How to handle subdirectories in Moz and Webmaster Tools?
I have 3 websites: http://www.abc.com (English pages) http://www.abc.com/fr (French) http://www.abc.com/de (German) Webmaster Tools In Google Analytics: I created an Account called ABC and created 4 properties with relative filters ABC Default (No filter) ABC English (filter to exclude /fr, /de) ABC French (filter to include /fr) ABC German (filter to include /de) In webmaster tools, I wish to add 3 sites http://www.abc.com http://www.abc.com/fr http://www.abc.com/de How do I validate each url with Google analytics, considering I just want the specific language for folder. How do I validate the domain name http://www.abc.com to always ensure the inclusion of the default english data? MOZ Do I need to create 3 campaigns (one per language) and if yes, again how do I handle http://www.abc.com which should exclude /fr and /de? Thank you
Moz Pro | | seo12120 -
Is the Moz Ranking Report correct?
Hello here, today I got my weekly report from Moz by email and it reported a strong decline of rankings on some of our major keywords. Then I went to check on Google personally, and instead I found my pages ranked much higher than reported by Moz (please note that my results wasn't personalized...). I also use a desktop program to check my rankings, and what I found personally on Google corresponded to what my desktop program reported me. Here is an example: my website is virtualsheetmusic.com, and Moz reported a rank NOT in top 50 for the following keyword: "moonlight sonata sheet music" Whereas we are actually on the 19th spot. Another example for the keyword "czardas violin sheet music", Moz reports NOT in top 50, whereas we are actually at the 5th spot on the first page of Google results! Why's this? Anyone can explain? Is there anything wrong with Moz ranking report?
Moz Pro | | fablau0 -
Rel=canonical Notice
In the Crawl Diagnostics report we see there 314 Rel Canonical notices. We use the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin and noticed that the URL is the exact same as the Tag value. When looking into the issue more, I see that the rel canonical tag is pointing to the same page as itself. For example, on the www.domain.com/blog/ page, there is a link rel="canonical" href="/blog/". Is this an issue that needs to be fixed? How can it be fixed? Will this cause any potential ranking issues? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | Prager0 -
Site metric tool
Is there a tool on here (or anywhere else) where you can upload a list of sites (say 500 sites) and be given things like mozrank on it?
Moz Pro | | thefresh0 -
What the . . ! Duplicate Pages and Titles WAY up?
My duplicate pages went up 50 plus in the past week, and my duplicate page titles went over more then 100. We recently redesigned the website, but it has been up for several weeks now. The only change I made specifically last week or late the week before was to get my 301 redirects done to get the www. version and the non www version pointing to the same place (as well as a couple other sites that point to it). I'm sure this is not enough info to figure out what went wrong . . . I'd love some help in figuring this out though.
Moz Pro | | damon12120