Duplicate Page Titles & Content
-
We have just launched a new version of a website and after running it through SEOMOZ we have over 6000 duplicate title & content errors. (awesome)
We have products that show up multiple times under different URLs however we "thought" we had implemented the rel=canonical correctly.
My question is - do these errors still show up in SEOMOZ despite the canonical tags being there OR if they were "correct" would we be getting "zero" errors?
-
Hi Ladies & Gents
It was a canonical tag error - we went from 6000 errors to 11500 errors and now after the issue was fixed we have a handful of non related errors to sort.
Really appreciate all the feedback.
Kind Regards
Liam
-
how are you getting on, did this get resolved?
-
Hey Peter, I'm just having problems with the 4th example, and I believe you are doing it wrong. Not to try to point out problems with your software, but the report that I now have is more or less unusable for my clients because you see the duplicates this way.
What we have, is duplicates reaching to different categories with canonical set up.
B references A in category 1
D references C in category 2
and hundreds more ...But, because B and D are empty, except for the navigation, the tool sees B and D as duplicates. Two problems with that:
1. They are not even "considered" by Google, because they reference something else as a canonical, so they are not duplicates of each other.
2. The report now shows 10 different pages from different categories as duplicates, and with the number of false identified duplicates it is now impossible for me to find any real duplicates.So, is my understanding wrong, and what can we do to find the really duplicated pages?
Thanks,
-
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out to us! I'm sorry if there are any confusions regarding the way we classify duplicate content. Just clarify a few things, 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.For more information on using canonical tags, check out this great post by our very own Dr. Pete:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsI hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Best,
Peter
SEOmoz Help Team. -
Thanks for the responses - sort of what I feared but haven't implemented canonical tags before so was unsure whether they should be showing.
Looks like there is a long day ahead
-
I am afraid i don’t know the detailed ins and outs of SEOMozs products, however we have some paginated pages on one of our sites. Our crawl reports are not showing errors for duplicate page titles and they are detailed in the notices section as canonical.
This implies to me that the crawl reports do ignore correctly formatted canonical tags. Perhaps you could download the error list and the list of discovered canonical tags and compare the two to confirm. Alternately try crawling the site with other tools, the one i would recommend is Screaming Frog as this will allow you to filter canonical tags in the reports, and do it for free.
-
Hi,
All things being equal, if the canonical tags are properly implemented you should see zero.
For ecomm sites, it is pretty easy to get duplicate title and content warnings from similar but not identical product pages which is usually an indication of thin content (no descriptions or one line descriptions that are almost identical).
So first line of enquiry is to confirm the canonicals are really doing what you expect them to be doing and if after the next crawl you still see duplicate issues then download them in a csv and start investigating them to see which pages are being flagged.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Is my 404 page set up correctly?
HI there! In using a few different tools, and I have received varied result concerning my 404 page. In WebSite Auditor from Link Assistant, it says my page is set up incorrectly. My webmaster has told me that it is set up correctly, but at this point I'm not entirely sure what's what. Is there another way to test it? I guess i'm not quite sure about the jargon and what "return 404 response code" actually means. Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | NutcrackerBalletGifts0 -
Pages to Optimise Issues
HI, Can someone tell me why 2 A pages are showing up in red in the F Grade page ? I see Page title missing from the output and just curious if I need to addrss some issue. xpOW4tY.jpg
Moz Pro | | ecrmeuro0 -
Seo moz has only crawled 2 pages of my site. Ive been notified of a 403 error and need an answer as to why my pages are not being crawled?
SEO Moz has only crawled 2 pages of my clients site. I have noticed the following. A 403 error message screaming frog also cannot crawl the site but IIS can. Due to the lack of crawling ability, im getting no feed back on my on page optimization rankings or crawl diagnostics summary, so my competitive analysis and optimization is suffering Anybody have any idea as to what needs to be done to rectify this issue as access to the coding or cms platform is out of my hands. Thank you
Moz Pro | | nitro-digital0 -
SEOMoz Q&A having some issues?
Apologies if this has been asked. I was browsing Q&A and got a Ruby error page, reloaded and everything was fine. However a bunch of the topics are kind of messed up, and it looks like a chunk of them are missing now. For example my 'questions I've answered' section of My Q&A only has the newest question and the oldest question, and when I sort the SEOMoz Tools category by newest I get one recent post and then the next one is from November of last year. You guys having database problems?
Moz Pro | | icecarats0 -
Fixing the Too Many On-Page Links
In our campaign I see that it reported that some of our pages have too many on-page links. But I think most of the links that was seen by MozBot is related to our images. There are a lot of images in our site and at the same time we support 11 languages which adds additional links One of the pages that have a lot of links is www.florahospitality.com/dining.aspx What can you <a></a>suggest to fix this? Thanks. <a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a>
Moz Pro | | shebinhassan0 -
An error in the SeoMoz On page note?
Hello folks, Whenever I go the OnPage link in SeoMoz some of my links show a F ranking note. And when I click in one of them to see the detail of the page rank, it shows me as an A ranking note. Do you have seen the same problem? Which note shall I rely on? Thanks!!
Moz Pro | | jgomes0 -
On-Page Summary (Report Cards) automation?
Hi everyone, Under the "On-Page" tab which shows your report cards, is there a way of getting it to grade your entire site? One of my site's is only ~20 pages so it's no big deal to manually enter each URL and set each one to update weekly. But what if I have a site that has ~1,000 pages and I want to optimise each and every page for my main keyword using the report cards feature? Thanks in advance! 🙂 Ash
Moz Pro | | AshSEO20110 -
Keywords in front of the title element and on page keyword optimization
After running one of my landing pages through the SEOmoz on-page keyword optimization tool, I see that my keywords are 13 characters from the front of the title. My page is already receiving an A letter grade. The 13 characters in front of my keyword phrase are not vital, but they related to the keyword phrase. Is it that important that I drop the related word, in order to get my keyword phrase to start at the front?
Moz Pro | | Ticket_King0