Duplicate Titles Shown in Moz Analytics
-
Hello,
My Moz analytics show over 50 duplicate titles. This because my website title is shown on each page (eg About us | Social Engagement, Contact us | Social Engagement, etc.)
Is this really an error to be fixed, that otherwise will impact rankings? Or can I leave it as it is? I don't mind having my website title on each page, but if its worth removing it due to duplicate issues impacting ranking, I will remove
In this case, does someone have any suggestion on how to do this? Which files should I modify? (Im using Wordpress CMS, and I dont see each page code)
Thanks in advance.
Regards,Eugenio | Social Engagement (http://socialengagement.it)
-
Hello Tuzel,
Thank you again for your help. Plugin could not be deactivated as it left translation and original all in one page.
I found out that I could also use this code in the header.php of the website
Hope it will work, seems less strong than canonical, maybe better try with this first
-
Depends how integral that plugin is to your site. I personally would go straight for the cannonicals but is you can afford to turn it off and experiment then why not. Experimentation is the only way we really find things out in this industry.
-
Hello Tuzzel,
Thanks again you clarified me many doubts I will keep you updated, I will amend those issues by today.
Do you think is more wise and better to try first deactivating the plugin, and after checking if there is any result, reactivate it and have canonicals for all /en pages? Or is better just to use canonical directly?
Thanks
-
No worries. A canonical is not the same as a 301 however. You should be able to keep the translated pages and allow users to view them, a canonical will signal to search engines only that these pages are the same. A 301 will redirect users to one version of the page too which removes the value of the translated content for your users.
Here's another Q&A thread i was involved in yesterday focusing on Cannonical tags that should make this clearer.
Please do keep me posted, always interested in the outcomes.
Thanks, Tom.
-
I have a plugin for wordpress for language translation. I will try to deactivate it, and see if ranking goes up at least a bit. If it does, it means the plugin and /en urls caused the duplicate issues, and maybe also a drop in rankings.. I will let you know the results, if you are interested
Thanks again to all for help!
-
Hello,
Thanks everyone for replies.
Dave, I already choose a preferred domain
Chris, thanks for the useful tip. I think I already got penalized for this (eg I have 3 blog posts all with the keywords "website ranking" in the url, all for different seo strategies, and only one page is ranked for those keywords). I think i only could 301 redirect, but at the moment, I will leave it as it is, and be more careful in the future.
Tuzzel, thanks, your reply really helped also. I have seen in the Google guide you posted that I should use top domains for translations. This is not possible at the moment. Then you suggested to use canonical tags. Does it mean I should 301 redirect all translated pages to the original ones?
-
Hi,
I think if you look into the duplicate titles problem you may find that it's nothing to do with your brand being in the title, it may be that your domain is being seen with and without the WWW as 2 separate pages.
You will need to make a descision wether to go with www or not.
A simple redirect on one to the other should fix this.
Regards
-
Social,
I think of title tags as sort of like a magnifying glass that Google looks through to see the rest of the words on your page. When the words in the title tag correspond closely with the rest of the words on the page, it may create just enough focus (relevance) to permit the page rank well for a keyword used in the title.
However, if a second or third or fourth page on the site has the same title tag, then those pages would have to have the same page copy as the first if they were to rank as well as the first. Since that would be duplicate content, however, they could never actually make it to the top of the search results.
Two things: 1.) Unique page titles help a page to rank for the unique keyword focus it was optimized for. 2.) Many identical page titles on a site may lower the overall quality and ranking ability on the site in general.
That's all to say you're better off with unique page titles for each page.
-
Hi Eugenio,
Without seeing the Moz reports not totally sure what you are seeing there but if they are as you described they pose no problem, i.e 'page | Brand'.
I took a quick look on Screaming frog however and think i may know what Moz is reporting as i can see a lot of Duplicate titles being caused by the fact you have two versions of each page on two different subdomains
- /en/tag/{Page}
- /en/{Page}
And another few where there is a /{page} and /en/{page}. I thought you may have solved it with Canonical tags as i can see them in the reports to but they just seem to be refering the same pages back to themselve (Not an issue in itself)
I would suggest then this may be the root cause of what you are seeing and should try to take a look at these, Heres a few resources on Dupe content, not sure how familiar or not you are with it, appologies if i am telling you stuff you allready know.
- Which page is canonical (Moz)
- Dupe Content (Webmaster help)
- Common SEO problems and how to fix (Moz, lot of focus on dupe content)
Thanks, Tom.
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 in WordPress Taxonomies & Noindex, Follow
Hello Moz Community, We are seeing duplicate content issues in our Moz report for our WordPress site’s Tag pages. After a bit of research, it appears one of the best solutions is to set Tag pages to “no index, follow” within Yoast. That makes sense, but we have a few questions: In doing this, how are we affecting our opportunity to show up in search results? Are there any other repercussions to making this change? What would it take to make the content on these pages be seen as unique?
Moz Pro | | CoreyHicks1 -
Canonicalisation/ Moz/ WP.
Hi, I've recently put a new site live using Wordpress, and have hooked it up to Moz Analytics. Moz is reporting >1000 pages with 'missing meta description page', and >250 with 'duplicate page content'. The issues seem to be being flagged by pages with '?sort=asc&view=main', ?show=paged&view=main, '?sort=ratedup&show=all&view=list', etc. I have a number of category pages, which users can filter by etc to give them the information in the way they want to see it. I have this ' I haven't got many pages indexed by Google yet, so can't see if they're hitting the same issues as Moz. Any help/ advice appreciated.
Moz Pro | | newstd1000 -
Codeigniter - Controller and duplicate pages
Hi there, I use Codeigniter as framework and I have a question about the duplicate page. Actually, for default, the typical page in a CodeIgniter framework is something like this: http://www.domain.com/site/contact where site is the controller containing the contact function that point to the contact.html view... To have a better URL I use a trick with the "routes" that redirect any http://www.domain.com/contact to the original http://www.domain.com/site/contact Of course the both are valid and the both are... crawled! So I get the duplicate page. Is this something I have to manage, maybe with .htaccess? Any idea would be very appreciated. Thanks for you precious time guys! Shella
Moz Pro | | CarloShellaMascella0 -
White Label Version of Moz Pro?
I may have missed it, but is there a white label option for Moz Pro? I have a few clients that would like to login and have a look at competition, rankings, etc. Perhaps something like WebCEO or MySEOtool?
Moz Pro | | TysonDowns0 -
Duplicate Content in Blog
Hi, SEOMoz on-page analysis is reporting that our blog has duplicate content when technically it doesn't. Is this something that we need to address as it will actually be hurting our ranking or is this just a SEOMoz software quirk? There is 100+ example like this but here is one example. SEOMoz is reporting http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog/author/InvoiceStudio?page=1 and http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog/author/InvoiceStudio?page=2 as a duplicate content and Title Tag. Thanks Andrew
Moz Pro | | Studio330 -
Re : Duplicate Content
Hello, I am a pro member, in my campaign it says duplicate content for few urls. which i m not able to understand, because both the url's are same but why its showing under duplicate content. here are the urls example. http://www.giftbig.com/helios-gift-card.html http://www.giftbig.com/helios-gift-card.html/
Moz Pro | | dasjoy850 -
404 errors, but not showing in Google analytics
In my SEOmoz errors there are over a dozen 404 errors listed. However, they are not showing up in Google analytics. How can I find the referring url for the ones showing up here?
Moz Pro | | sakeith0 -
Duplicate content & canonicals
Hi, Working on a website for a company that works in different european countries. The setup is like this: www.website.eu/nl
Moz Pro | | nvs.nim
www.website.eu/be
www.website.eu/fr
... You see that every country has it's own subdir, but NL & BE share the same language, dutch... The copywriter wrote some unique content for NL and for BE, but it isn't possible to write unique for every product detail page because it's pretty technical stuff that goes into those pages. Now we want to add canonical tags to those identical product pages. Do we point the canonical on the /be products to /nl products or visa versa? Other question regarding SEOmoz: If we add canonical tags to x-pages, do they still appear in the Crawl Errors "duplicate page content", or do we have to do our own math and just do "duplicate page content" minus "Rel canonical" ?0