Why is Google Webmaster suddenly started showing hundreds of HTML Improvements

[Modi]

Why is Google Webmaster suddenly started showing hundreds of HTML Improvements

I mean to ask, my hundreds pages are been shown as duplicate - despite canonical marked correctly

Below are sample url - which are been crawled in own way. I have rechecked canonical tag - which is correct as URL - 1, in all 3 url

Do i need to worry about anything or shall i presume its a flaw from search engine to report this as an issue (This only pertain to Forum section)

http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_easydiscuss&view=post&id=1683&Itemid=78

http://www.mycarhelpline.com/?id=1683&Itemid=78&option=com_easydiscuss&view=post

http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_easydiscuss&view=post&id=1683

ps - i know these are dynamic url and not sef friendly url, but its been 3 yrs and  , due to our ignorance and site builder took advantage of this. now - nothing can be done much to make them sef friendly as site has several thousand pages and touchwood - these dynamic url are not impacting much

[nurzhyk]

There are some potential ways to solve this situation.

1.Close indexation of duplicate urls in robots.txt

2.Set up derictive in GWT delete urls from index with parameters that identify duplicate content. Mike wrote the examples of parameters before.

Important to evaluate the trend whether the amount of errors in html improvement section in GWT. If it grows you should use some additional steps not only canonical urls.

[Modi]

Thanks Mike for views

I have not set up or ignored - ?id= and ?option= parameters in Webmaster. As due to the fact entire site has dynamic url like this.

Just wondering - if its a directive, and page has same content - title, description - is there any alternate way if search engine do not respect that directive. Is 301 the only way in that case of anything else too !!

[Modi]

Sure, thnx. I checked with Xenu. However - it did not reported url 2 and url 3, while crawling the site. Presuming, it will correct on itself. thnx

[MikeRoberts]

First, remember that canonicals are a suggestion not a directive. Which means if Google doesn't feel the need to honor the canonical then it doesn't. Also, I would check how you have parameter handling set up in WMT since that could be affecting how googlebot is crawling the page and how it views ?id= and ?option= on your site. It may also be, as Nakul pointed out, not really anything... sometimes WMT will show an error that isn't an error until it gets another good crawl of those pages and fixes itself.

[NakulGoyal]

I have seen this happen in GWT several times. I wouldn't worry about it. Keep crawling your website with a crawler like Screaming Frog to identify any of these kinds of issues.