Moz Crawler URL paramaters & duplicate content

[Vukan_Simic]

Hi all, this is my first post on Moz Q&A

Questions:

1. Does the Moz Crawler take into account rel="canonical" for search results pages with sorting / filtering URL parameters?
2. How much time does it take for an issue to disappear from the issues list after it's been corrected? Does it come op in the next weekly report?

I'm asking because the crawler is reporting 50k+ pages crawled, when in reality, this number should be closer to 1000. All pages with query parameters have the correct canonical tag pointing to the root URL, so I'm wondering whether I need to noindex the other pages for the crawler to report correct data?:

Original (canonical URL): DOMAIN.COM/charters/search/mx/BS?search_location=cabo-san-lucas

Filter active URL: DOMAIN.COM/charters/search/mx/BS?search_location=cabo-san-lucas&booking_date=&booking_days=1&booking_persons=1&priceFilter%5B%5D=0%2C500&includedPriceFilter%5B%5D=drinks-soft

Also, if noindex is the only solution, will it impact the ranking of the pages involved?

Note: Google and Bing are semi-successful in reporting index page count, each reporting around 2.5k result pages when using the site:DOMAIN.com query. The rel canonical tag was missing for a short period of time about 4 weeks ago, but since fixing the issue these pages still haven't been deindexed.

Appreciate any suggestions regarding Moz Crawler & Google / Bing index count!

[SamWeber]

Happy to help!

We crawled roughly 49k pages because there were that many links on the site that we could find. 50k is also the new standard crawl limit for campaigns in Standard and Medium subscriptions. Adding a rel=canonical to a page doesn't mean it won't get crawled by our campaign crawler, only that the crawler is to refer to the canonicalized link for reporting purposes.

Without going into too specific of URL details, these pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example,

DOMAIN.COM/charters/search/mx/QR?booking_date=&booking_days=&booking_persons=search_location%25252525253Dcabo-san-lucasbooking_date=&booking_days=&booking_persons=search_location%25252525253Dcabo-san-lucas&limit=20&offset=20

is considered a duplicate of

DOMAIN.COM/charters/search/mx/QR?booking_date=&booking_days=&booking_persons=limit%252525253D20

because the canonical tag for the first page is

DOMAIN.COM/charters/search/mx/QR?offset=20

while the canonical for the second URL is

DOMAIN.COM/charters/search/mx/QR

Since the canonical tags point to different pages it is assumed that DOMAIN.COM/charters/search/mx/QR?offset=20 and DOMAIN.COM/charters/search/mx/QR 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 above example from your campaign actually falls into the fourth example I've listed above. Hope this helps clear things up

[Vukan_Simic]

Thanks Sam!

I've read the post and checked my canonical tags but still can't seem to find what's causing the canonicalized pages to be indexed by RogerBot. The same page shows up in Moz's crawl test 100 times with slightly different parameters.

I'll keep investigating but some specific feedback from Moz staff would be appreciated

[SamWeber]

Hi!

I'm going to leave the strategy discussion open to the community but from a technical standpoint, we will count rel=canonical on dynamic urls as long as they are implemented correctly. Dr. Pete has a great post where he talks about canonicals that might be helpful as well. Updates to campaigns happen on a weekly basis depending on when the campaign was created. So if it was created on a Tuesday, you'll see updated campaign data every Tuesday after. You can run a crawl test (accessible from Research Tools) to get 3k page crawls in between your updates though. Hope this helps!

[Vukan_Simic]

Thanks for the info searchbuzz. So if I understand correctly, new pages are crawled and kept in the index (up to the campaign limit), but issues on indexed pages are reported separately.

My issue is that due to the dynamic URLs used in search filters on my site I actually have 49k issues detected (over 95% are duplicate content and long URL issues because the crawler is indexing the same page many times for each URL parameter combination). The crawl test can't index the entire site because it generates a huge amount of pages.

It's a travel-related website with listings in 233 cities and multiple filter functionality, so each unique 'page' of results is indexed more than 100 times, even though there's a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the non-parametrized URL of that page.