Why is Moz Reporting as Duplicate Page Titles?

[lbohen]

Our most recent MOZ crawl campaign is reporting 931 duplicate page title errors, most of which are "Product Review" pages like the following. Although there is only one review on this page, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/Cell_Stephen_King_unabridged_compact_discs.html, MOZ is reporting 15 duplicate page title, four of which I present below.

http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/name/desc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/rating/asc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/rating/desc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/state/asc

Why is MOZ reporting these "pages" as duplicate page title errors?

Are these errors hurting our SEO?

How to fix?

[Everett]

Hello Larry,

Yes this is a problem for you, and could be harming your rankings. Google has hundreds of those review pages indexed from your domain already: http://goo.gl/Ey7w4c

There are a number of ways to deal with this issue, as outlined below:

1. The quickest, easiest way to get them out of the index is to use the URL Removal Tool in Google Webmaster Tools to remove the entire /reviews/ directory from the index. Then you can place a disallow statement in your robots.txt file to block the entire /reviews/ directory from being crawled and indexed again in the future. The downside of this is that you won't get much, if any, "credit" for links pointing to those review pages. However, I doubt anyone is linking to them to begin with.

2. You could put a rel canonical tag on the review pages, which would point to the product page for which the review was left. For example, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/name/desc would have this as a rel canonical tag:

3. You could 301 redirect the review pages to the product page, as someone else suggested, but I think this would cause all sorts of unintended errors and redirects on your reviews platform. I don't recommend this route.

4. You could use a noindex,follow meta tag on the review pages.

Googlebot and Mozbot, and their respective indexes, behave differently. You're not always going to get the exact same numbers from GWT that you get from Moz.com. Use Moz.com to identify critical issues on your site, rather than expecting it to give the same broken link count, 404 error, duplicate page count, etc... as Google.

I hope this helps give you some options. Also, I recently wrote an article that I think might help you:
eCommerce Product Review Solutions

Good luck!

[BlueprintMarketing]

When I type in to Safari or any web browser the link

http://www.audiobooksonline.com/Cell_Stephen_King_unabridged_compact_discs.html

I get

http://www.audiobooksonline.com/cgi-audiobooksonline/sb/ss_mb.cgi?storeid=*246687a2b4c3b7ca741bc640f0a2791ab143627f&ss_parm=Ac4657cb286a395163ae8b68293308550

Sucuri.net a great tool
Tells me this

http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/www.audiobooksonline.com/cell_stephen_king_unabridged_compact_discs.html

Scan for: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/cell_stephen_king_unabridged_compact_discs.html
Hostname: www.audiobooksonline.com
IP address: 216.38.0.121

System Details:
Running on: Apache
Unable to properly scan your site. Site returning error (40x): HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

Web application details:
Application: ShopSite Pro 11 sp2 r5.1 (data - sd360_page_template.html)
Google Analytics installed: UA-10432774-2

& shop site said this.

http://support.shopsite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9440

Hope this helps.
Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

PS having capital letters in URLs is never a good idea. It can create duplicate content in the eyes of Google for  Lenox  user or most of us. So if you can never use capital letters in URLs and if it is an issue sometimes you will have to 301 redirect to a cleaned up URL with 100% lowercase letters

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Larry,

I think what Chris said is right on the money however it only really helps you with Google so other search engines will still see this is duplicate content fortunately that doesn't mean very much of the market is being affected however if I were you I'd rather fix it for good.

This link shows what to do and almost the exact issue you're having right now is there example

http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

& this is a link to a 301 redirect generator

http://www.htaccessredirect.com

Remember to also use a
Rel=Canonical put this tag in the correct page you want to show people.

Then do a 301 redirect on the pages that are duplicates

Examples
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/name/desc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/rating/asc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/rating/desc
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/state/asc

Point them so there is only one

Screaming frog spider Seo
Is an amazing tool that if you purchase it will allow you to do the redirects however you can see the issues very clearly and websites under 500 pages using the free version websites with over 500 pages in order to see all the pages you must purchase it which gives you the power to redirect and cleanup sites extremely quickly

I hope this helps,
Thomas

[lbohen]

Our Google Webmaster Tools reports 18 duplicate page titles. Mox crawl reported 931. ????

[CKerr]

"Our page http://www.audiobooksonline.com/Cell_Stephen_King_unabridged_compact_discs.html has ONLY one review however the MOZ crawl is picking up fifteen different page addresses. Evidently the Review module is creating all these page addresses."

You may want to take a look in you Google Webmaster Tools and see which pages appear there for duplicate page titles.  I think your website might have a :/sortby or /rankby feature that produces those extra pages.  If that is the case you can set up "URL Parameters" field in webmaster tools that will tell Google not to count those as pages.

I hope this helps.

[lbohen]

Thomas; Thank you for looking at this issue. You are correct that each page title is the same.

A PHP based "Review" module creates a form allowing folks to enter their review and then assigns a page address. We have no direct ability of assigning page titles for reviews.

Our page http://www.audiobooksonline.com/Cell_Stephen_King_unabridged_compact_discs.html has ONLY one review however the MOZ crawl is picking up fifteen different page addresses. Evidently the Review module is creating all these page addresses.

Any idea if these multiple product review pages are hurting our SERPs?

[BlueprintMarketing]

they are being accurate in their report

please look at your webpages source code and look at your title for every one of those links it is the same

Product Review - Cell: Stephen King - CD audiobook

Luckily a simple fix is at hand.

Use this link to take you to a great free tool which will allow you to build the title tags along with description if you feel it necessary. Description is important if you want to rank well as it needs to tell possible visitors what they can expect.

I made a example of what I would do in your situation I don't know if they're part to or not but that's how I differentiated them. Whatever information the page contains should be written out in the title tag along with the description you can also put the author and I would not waste time using keywords they are obsolete.

Your original title tag

<title>Product Review  - Cell: Stephen King - CD audiobook</title>

my example

<title>Product Review part two - Cell: Stephen King - CD audiobook</title>

Was made with

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/meta-tag-generator/

I hope this is of help,

Thomas