Crwal errors : duplicate content even with canonical links

[phes]

Hi

I am getting some errors for duplicate content errors in my crawl report for some of our products

www.....com/brand/productname1.html

www.....com/section/productname1.html

www.....com/productname1.html

we have canonical in the header for all three pages

<link rel="canonical" href="www....com productname1.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="www....com>

[phes]

hi

This does not seem correct to me i will check out the link you have provided, but not sure how these pages can be considered duplicate when all three pages have the exact same url defined within the canonical meta

Regards Paul

[DavidLee]

Hi Phes!

I looked into your campaign and it seems that this is happening because of where your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example, /brands/ is considered a duplicate of /products/ because the canonical tag for the first page is "product2500" while the canonical for the second URL is "product2000".

Since the canonical tags point to different pages it is assumed that /brands/ and /products/ are likely to be duplicates themselves.

Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:

Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,

If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
The examples you've provided actually fall into the fourth example I've listed above.

For more information on using canonical tags, check out this great post by our very own Dr. Pete:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Hope this helps!