Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content
-
I've been a Pro Member for nearly a year and I am bound and determined to finally clean up all the crawl errors on our site PracticeRange.com.
We have 180 errors for Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content. I fixed many of the pages that were product pages with duplicate content. Those product descriptions were edited and now have unique content.
However, there remain plenty of the errors that are puzzling. Many of the errors reference the same pages, for example, the Home Page, Login Page and the Search page (our catalog pages).
In the case of the Catalog Page errors, these type pages would have the same title every time "Search" and the results differ according to category.http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=6
http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=15If this is rel=canonical issue, how do I fix it on a search result page? I want each of the different category type pages to be indexed. One of them is no more important than the other. So how would I incorporate the rel=canonical?
In the case of the Home Page errors, I'm really confused. I don't know where to start to fix these. They are the result of a 404 error that leads to the home page. Is the content of the 404 page the culprit since it contains a link to the home page?
Here are examples of the Home Page type of crawl errors.
Thanks ,
-
Thanks Dan,
I appended the asterisk. I also tested the robots.txt in google webmaster tools. It alerted me of the required : colon after the disallow statement. I missed that somehow.
The next crawl should finally ignore those search catalog pages.
Best Regards,
Alan
-
Hi Alan,
It seems like you are only targeting the search page, I would suggest adding a * at the end to capture all variations.
Dan
-
Hi Dan,
Latest SEOMOZ crawl still reports 108 Duplicate Page Titles. Almost all of them are from the Search page.
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=5
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=50
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=51
Search
http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=52
etc.....
I added Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx but it still picked it up during the crawl. Here is the robots.txt.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /Admin/
Disallow: /App_Themes/
Disallow: /Assets/
Disallow: /Checkout/
Disallow: /ClientApi/
Disallow: /ConLib/
Disallow: /FCKeditor/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /Install/
Disallow: /Layouts/
Disallow: /Members/
Disallow: /webcharts/
Disallow: /Basket.aspx
Disallow: /BuyProduct.ashx
Disallow: /*.axd$
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspxSitemap: <http: www.practicerange.com="" sitemap.xml="">Sitemap: http://www.practicerange.com/sitemap.xml</http:>
Am I missing something on the syntax to get the crawl to ignore our Search Pages?
Best Regards,
Alan
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | -
Hi Alan,
Have a look in google webmasters to see if the same 404's are occuring there. If so, they typically give you a list of page that generate the error page. It would be best to eliminate these issues at the source first as they will be offering a poor user experience.
As a prevented measure you could run these pages as a disallow, yes. But I fear that this will make it more difficult to detect these issues in future.
Dan
-
Thanks Dan,
Got it. The catalog pages are not beneficial and the duplication could be hurting.
So I added the disallow statement for the Search pages. We will see if it fixes the problem on our next crawl and change syntax as needed.
Would a similar disallow for the 404.aspx would solve the Home Page 404 crawl errors? Something like...
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/404.aspx?*
Best Regards,
Alan Wills
-
Hi Alan,
This is a two part question. For the search results I would add
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=*
To your robots.txt file. I would probably increase to the entirety of search (by removing the ?m= from the line above), but as I don't completely comprehend how your search section works start with the above. It very rare that search pages offer new content, generally they dilute other pages by duplication.
With your second issue I imagine there are clues in the aspxerrorpath variable. Although I couldn't get any combination of this string to render the below url didn't return to the 404 page like the rest did. Its the tilda (~) in the error string that I think offers the biggest clue.
http://www.practicerange.com/Golf-Training-Aids/Golf-Nets/
Hope this helps,
Dan
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
-
How to fix duplicate content for homepage and index.html
Hello, I know this probably gets asked quite a lot but I haven't found a recent post about this in 2018 on Moz Q&A, so I thought I would check in and see what the best route/solution for this issue might be. I'm always really worried about making any (potentially bad/wrong) changes to the site, as it's my livelihood, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Moz, SEMRush and several other SEO tools are all reporting that I have duplicate content for my homepage and index.html (same identical page). According to Moz, my homepage (without index.html) has PA 29 and index.html has PA 15. They are both showing Status 200. I read that you can either do a 301 redirect or add rel=canonical I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page and don't have any rel=canonical added to the site/page. What is the best and safest way to get rid of duplicate content and merge the my non index and index.html homepages together these days? I read that both 301 and canonical pass on link juice but I don't know what the best route for me is given what I said above. Thank you for reading, any input is greatly appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | dreservices0 -
Duplicate content - "Same" profile-information
Hi, I own a casting website with lots of profiles. Some of these profiles only typed in their firstname, email and age, when they registered on the site, and they haven't added more information ever since. From Crawl Diagnostics, I can see that there is "lots" of these profiles, which looks exactly the same (only showing age and firstname), allthought they are not the same. I could add which day the profile were created on the site, to maybe avoid these "duplications". The email will always be hidden. Or, how big an issue is this? Crawl Diagnostics tells me, that there is around 200 of these, and they are "marked" as High Priority. Any ideas on what to do? /Kasper
On-Page Optimization | | KasperGJ0 -
Duplicate Content only an Issue on a Huge Scale?
To what extent is duplicate content an issue? We have a support forum with some duplicate content because users ask the same questions. The Moz reports we receive highlights our duplicate content and page title for our support forum as a "big" issue. I'm unsure to what extent it harms our SEO, and making the support section non-crawable would impair our level of support. It would be nice to know for sure if we should be concerned about this, and if yes, how can we do it differently? Thanks, I appreciate you help. -Allan
On-Page Optimization | | Todoist0 -
Meta Title for Category Pages
I am trying to improve the SEO for a few key category pages on my blog. I have two ranking really well so I want to boost them and bring up some others. Can I put two keywords in the meta title? Example: Maternity Deals | Pregnancy Deals Or should I just stick with one? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
How google handle with Title when is invisible on the page?
I would like to display H1 Title tag invisible on the homepage. I set up Title colour same colour as background colour. How google handle with this cloaking? What should I to set up in the style.css?
On-Page Optimization | | joeko0 -
How to SEO a website that is being help back by duplicate content?
We have over 20 websites that sell property. Each website is targeted to a different country. People advertise to sell their property. The websites are not getting to page 1 for the terms we want probably because of duplication issues. If we compare one website with another country website on www.duplicatecontent.net we find it is nearly 70% between one and the other. So we trying to understand why this is. If someone wanted to sell a property in Spain we would create an advert for them but rather than putting this on the back-end of the Spain website it goes on a separate website that does on all countries. We have tried to put nofollow tags so that the country specific website gets acknowledgement of being the original website but the rankings for key-terms will not rise and the duplication % remains nearly 70%. Can anyone suggest the best way forward?
On-Page Optimization | | Feily0 -
I have one page on my site... but still get duplicate name and content errors.
i have only the index.html page. my domain has a permanent 301 to the root. why am i getting duplicate problems? i only have one page the index .html???
On-Page Optimization | | one4u2see0 -
How could I avoid the "Duplicate Page Content" issue on the search result pages of a webshop site?
My webshop site was just crawled by Roger, and it found 683 "Duplicate Page Content" issues. Most of them are result pages of different product searches, that are not really identical, but very similar to each other. Do I have to worry about this? If yes, how could I make the search result pages different? IS there any solution for this? Thanks: Zoltan
On-Page Optimization | | csajbokz0