Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
-
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages.
The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title.
e.g.
Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products
Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title.
From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this?
Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
-
When you say "Google Webmaster tools," is it inside the seomoz pro dashboard? Or do I need to create a google webmaster account?
If you have a website, you should definitely have a Google WMT account. Go to www.google.com/webmasters and register your site. It is a must for anyone who cares about SEO for their site and related analytics.
For the SEOmoz report, I asked that same question to SEOmoz help. The reply I received was:
"it sounds you made a change to the way your site is indexed by Google directly in Webmaster Tools. Since we don't have access to GWT, we can't account for any changes that you've made in there, unfortunately. Furthermore, these issues are still present for crawlers other than Googlebot, so if you want to make sure those fixes are indexed by Bing/Yahoo, make sure to submit the fixes to their index tools or make the changes directly on your site. On the other hand, if you don't care about those search engines, feel free to just ignore our warnings. Our software is over-inclusive of errors so that you can choose which errors/warnings/issues to act on and how. We'd rather give you too much information than too little!"
With the ?pg=2 parameter, is there a way for google not to treat it as two URLs with same title and at the same time make both appear in search results?
In Google WMT you can see the Parameter Action as Don't Ignore. You would then need to fix the Duplicate Title issue on your site.
I am not advising this approach, but merely responding to your question of how to do it.
-
Sorry, but when you say "Google Webmaster tools," is it inside the seomoz pro dashboard? Or do I need to create a google webmaster account?
The reports I've given came from one of our Campaigns inside the SEOmoz PRo Dashboard. I don't see a Site Configuration here.
With the ?pg=2 parameter, is there a way for google not to treat it as two URLs with same title and at the same time make both appear in search results?
-
?pg=2, etc. is referred to by Google as parameters.
If you only want the main page to appear in search results, and you are confident of this decision, you can log into your Google Webmaster Tools and adjust your settings. From your Dashboard screen choose Site Configuration > Seetings > Parameter Handling. In the Parameter column you will see "page" listed. Change the action to "Ignore".
With the above noted, page-2 content would normally be viewed as it's own, unique page. Your product list on page-2 (or whatever you are listing) would be different then page 1. If you provide content on each page such as product descriptions, etc. then you shouldn't have the problem of page-2 duplicating page 1.
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it. But I'm a bit more concerned with the example I presented wherein product pages are displayed on several pages where the first URL is identified by ?pg=1 and the second URL by ?pg=2
For the WWW and non www, we can fix that one, but for the sample I presented, I'm not sure how to go about it.
-
I took a look at a few of your pages. Your issue is a common one and can easily be fixed.
Let's use your Rock-N-Roller Bunny page as an example:
http://masterpet.com.au/NZ_Products/Small-Animal/Sml-Animal-Specials/Rock-N-Roller-Bunny/
http://www.masterpet.com.au/NZ_Products/Small-Animal/Sml-Animal-Specials/Rock-N-Roller-Bunny/
Both of the above links go to the exact same page. The first link does not include the www in the URL. While these two links go to the same page, they are seen as two separate pages, and that is causing duplicate content issues. To resolve the problem take the following steps:
1. Decide which version of your URL you wish to use, the www or non-www form.
2. If you haven't already done so, log into Google Web Master Tools and set your preferred URL format.
3. Going forward, ensure any links you create for your site use the chosen URL format.
4. Add a canonical tag to your pages. This tag is a single link of HTML code added to the head of each page. If you decided upon using the www the format would be: http://www.masterpet.com.au/NZ_Products/Small-Animal/Sml-Animal-Specials/Rock-N-Roller-Bunny/" />
You may also wish to use a redirect in your .htaccess file to send visitors to the correct format of your page.
If you have a common template or structure for your site then these changes can all be done very quickly and then you can crawl your site again to confirm the matter is resolved.
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 from long Site Title
Hello! I have a number of "Duplicate Title Errors" as my website has a long Site Title: Planit NZ: New Zealand Tours, Bus Passes & Travel Planning. Am I better off with a short title that is simply my website/business name: Planit NZ My thought was adding some keywords might help with my rankings. Thanks Matt
Technical SEO | | mkyhnn0 -
Car Dealership website - Duplicate Page Content Issues
Hi, I am currently working on a large car dealership website. I have just had a Moz crawl through and its flagging a lot of duplicate page content issues, these are mostly for used car pages. How can I get round this as the site stocks many of the same car, model, colour, age, millage etc. Only unique thing about them is the reg plate. How do I get past this duplicate issue if all the info is relatively the same? Anyone experienced this issue when working on a car dealership website? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | karl621 -
Added 301 redirects, pages still earning duplicate content warning
We recently added a number of 301 redirects for duplicate content pages, but even with this addition they are still showing up as duplicate content. Am I missing something here? Or is this a duplicate content warning I should ignore?
Technical SEO | | cglife0 -
Duplicate title/content errors for blog archives
Hi All Would love some help, fairly new at SEO and using SEOMoz, I've looked through the forums and have just managed to confuse myself. I have a customer with a lot of duplicate page title/content errors in SEOMoz. It's an umbraco CMS and a lot of the errors appear to be blog archives and pagination. i.e. http://example.com/blog http://example.com/blog/ http://example.com/blog/?page=1 http://example.com/blog/?page=2 and then also http://example.com/blog/2011/08 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=1 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=2 http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=3 (empty page) http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=4 (empty page) This continues for different years and months and blog entries and creates hundreds of errors. What's the best way to handle this for the SEOMoz report and the search engines. Should I rel=canonical the /blog page? I think this would probably affect the SEO of all the blog entries? Use robots.txt? Sitemaps? URL parameters in the search engines? Appreciate any assistance/recommendations Thanks in advance Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
My issue with duplicate content is this. There are two versions of my website showing up http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/ What are the best practices for fixing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital0 -
Duplicate titles- what quailfies??
What qulifies as a duplicate title? If I have one tile Kelowna Real estate Smith McLellan Group and another title Kelowna Condos Smith Mclellan Group Is that a dupilcate title??
Technical SEO | | Realtor1010 -
Problem with duplicate content
Hi, My problem is this: SEOmoz tells me I have duplicate content because it is picking up my index page in three different ways: http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/ and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/index.php Can someone give me some advice as to how I can deal with this issue? thank you for your time, louandel15
Technical SEO | | louandel150 -
How to resolve duplicate content and title errors?
Hello, I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand. My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages. A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle. So my question: Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | jannkuzel0