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
-
Database driven content producing false duplicate content errors
How do I stop the Moz crawler from creating false duplicate content errors. I have yet to submit my website to google crawler because I am waiting to fix all my site optimization issues. Example: contactus.aspx?propid=200, contactus.aspx?propid=201.... these are the same pages but with some old url parameters stuck on them. How do I get Moz and Google not to consider these duplicates. I have looked at http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content with respect to Rel="canonical" and I think I am just confused. Nick
Technical SEO | | nickcargill0 -
Drupal duplicate pages
Anyone else encountered massive numbers of duplicate pages being reported on SEO Moz crawls for Drupal based sites? I assumed it was b/c there was no redirect on the print format pages, so I fixed that with a cannonical tag. But still seeing 2 or 3 duplicate pages reported for many pages. Any experience fixing this would be awesome to hear about. Thanks, Kevin
Technical SEO | | kevgrand0 -
SEOMOZ and non-duplicate duplicate content
Hi all, Looking through the lovely SEOMOZ report, by far its biggest complaint is that of perceived duplicate content. Its hard to avoid given the nature of eCommerce sites that oestensibly list products in a consistent framework. Most advice about duplicate content is about canonicalisation, but thats not really relevant when you have two different products being perceived as the same. Thing is, I might have ignored it but google ignores about 40% of our site map for I suspect the same reason. Basically I dont want us to appear "Spammy". Actually we do go to a lot of time to photograph and put a little flavour text for each product (in progress). I guess my question is, that given over 700 products, why 300ish of them would be considered duplicates and the remaning not? Here is a URL and one of its "duplicates" according to the SEOMOZ report: http://www.1010direct.com/DGV-DD1165-970-53/details.aspx
Technical SEO | | fretts
http://www.1010direct.com/TDV-019-GOLD-50/details.aspx Thanks for any help people0 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Avoiding duplicate content on product pages?
Hi, I'm creating a bunch of product pages for courses for a university and I'm concerned about duplicate content penalties. While the page names are different and some of the test is different, much of the text is the same between pairs of pages. I.e. a BA and an MA in a particular subject (say 'hairdressing' will have the same subject descriptions, school introduction paragraph, industry overview paragraph etc. 1. Is this a problem? In a site with 100 pages, if sets of 2 pages have about 50% identical content... 2. If it is a problem, is there anything I can do, other than rewrite the text? 3. From a search perspective, would both pages show up in search results in searches related to 'hairdressing courses' 'study hairdressing' etc? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Dealing with duplicate content
Manufacturer product website (product.com) has an associated direct online store (buyproduct.com). the online store has much duplicate content such as product detail pages and key article pages such as technical/scientific data is duplicated on both sites. What are some ways to lessen the duplicate content here? product.com ranks #1 for several key keywords so penalties can't be too bad and buyproduct.com is moving its way up the SERPS for similar terms. Ideally I'd like to combine the sites into one, but not in the budget right away. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Timmmmy0 -
A lot of product pages with very similar content
I'm working with someone who's setting up an online jewelry store. The jewelry is available in many metal types, so we're creating filters to provide a good user experience in trying to narrow down their choice. Let's take an example of a wedding ring that's available these options: 10kt yellow gold
Technical SEO | | Leighm
10kt white gold
18kt yellow gold
18kt white gold
Palladium
Platinum These are all entered as separate products, so that they can be used in the filtering system. However, apart from some minor changes to the title and description most of the content will be identical, across these 6 product pages. Also, many wedding ring styles are going to be very similar, so we're going to have very similar descriptions for a lot of the rings. We're concerned about problems this might cause with the search engines in terms of duplicate content. There's 2 issues that I an see (there may be more!): They will not index many of the pages and we'll leak link juice to those pages that will never get indexed They do index all the variations, but the content is so similar, that we have different pages competing for essentially the same keywords Also, these products are likely to come and go, so investing heavily on creating really unique content for them isn't really sustainable, affordable. Any advise? Thanks,0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello All, my first web crawl has come back with a duplicate content warning for www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm slightly mystified! thanks paul
Technical SEO | | simodal0