Duplicate Page Content Report on Moz - Still ranking in Google Results?

[bjs2010]

Hi,

I am experiencing 2 issues with the Duplicate Page Content in Moz.

1. Every week it is notifying me of new duplicate content - so it seems to be missing duplicate content each week and the crawl is never above the 5000-6000 page mark, which means that it is under 10K which is the limit, so presumably everything is crawled in that one go so surely it should detect all of the dupe content on 1 crawl as opposed to having to do various crawls to detect it no?

2. The dupe content report shows me pages that indeed have duplicate content but after checking, these are ranking on Google for their terms... ?

3. Is the duplicate page content report incremental ? Will it add more duplicate content and increase the report every week or does it just show that week's results? If so, it's a bit like chasing my tail...

Help!

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

Well it depends on the cms you are using, but most cms systems have the ability to spawn duplicate content through (for example) products in multiple categories with different urls, things like links to print versions of the page, wordpress can do it through archive pages, these kind of things. If you start looking at the referring pages in the right hand column you might well see a pattern emerging in regards how these duplicate pages are being linked to. This pattern is what I mean by systemic fault, not a fault as such but simply a part of the system's functionality that is creating this issue. The good news is these kinds of things are usually pretty easy to identify and fix either through altering the cms settings or else tinkering a bit in the code, and once you have done it, all related dup content issues are solved at the same time. Hope that makes sense!

[bjs2010]

Hi Lynn,

Appreciate your response - could you elaborate on what you mean by a systemic fault? Thanks!

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

The duplicate report only shows that weeks results so you don't need to chase your tail

In the duplicate report csv download you should see the duped pages right above/below each other in the left hand column. One of these two pages is probably ranking, unusual for it to be both of them. Having the dup content potentially makes it harder for them to rank since you are in effect splitting authority between two identical pages so always good to get rid of duplicates.

If it is notifying of new duplicate content each week, it sounds like it might be a systemic fault. Check which pages are referring to the two different version (far right hand column in the csv) and that should help guide you to the point in the system where the duplicates are being created. Often times a pretty simple one time fix and you are good to go!