Duplicated content detected with MOZ crawl with canonical applied
-
Hi there!
I have a slight problem.
I have a site with Joomla 3.3 that we recently migrated from 2.5.Joomla, for some reason that I don´t really get, creates hundreds of weird urls for the site like
mydomain.com/en -> joomla creates en/home/149-xxx-xxx/xxxxxx-xxxxxx that links to the first one.
The new version 3.3 knows this bug and applies a rel=canonical to the ones created "artificially", so they should not be identified as duplicated.Sample piece of code: en/home/149-all-en/xxxxxxx-xxxxxx" rel="canonical" /
MOZ crawler identifies this as duplicated and like this I have thousands of pages duplicated all with titles, content etc... all the ones created by joomla. Still my site has good SEO results and I can not see any penalties but I am a bit concerned they may come in the future....
Can anyone explain me what is happening?
Thank you in advance for your time,
-
If it's a period of 2 weeks and you're going to do it anyways, I would just make the new content and not go to the expense of setting up redirects and then taking them down, which can cause issues when you plan on recreating a URL.
-
Thank you for your time!
We are going to setup 301 redirects (one colleague suggested importing those directly in the DB of redirects) from those duplicated pages until joomla has a native solution and we have the time to make all unique content, to avoid penalties.
At least, we would solve temporaly the problem, it will take 2 weeks to make all the unique content.
Would that make sense?
Have a nice weekend!
-
I personally would not generate new language sections unless the content has been translated and localized on those pages. Right now your Spanish homepage has English content in the body, so I would view this as incomplete. Ideally you'd translate the entire page for those sections.
When you do that, you'll want to use hreflang, not canonicals, to indicate different versions of the same content.
So, my recommendation is (A) get rid of the Spanish content sections which would solve the duplication problem, or (B) finish translating the content and then install hreflang code, which would also solve the duplication problem.
Unfortunately I don't know of a good hreflang tool for Joomla specifically.
Let me know if that makes sense?
-
Thank you Kane.
I would like to keep the content in all the languages, ,as I think it is useful for customers to enter easily certain areas.
The problem that I am always having is the implementation...There are not real good canonical plugins (that would allow me to do a bulk import), and I am not that advanced as for doing an htaccess redirect with 301... still, I would like that if someone from NL or FI version would like to find the area barcelona could see it....
Anything on mind!? Just to say, I tried SH404, does all the work but rewrites the whole url structure (not possible), I tried canonical http://www.cmsplugin.com/products/components/4-canonical-url which solves the duplication by languages but not the random urls created by 3.3...
Then I decided to leave the plugin I mentioned before, it deletes all the duplicated urls generated automatically but does not solve the language problem...So, here I am
Any suggestion?
-
Also, if you decide to keep the /es/ section of the website then you'll need to look into hreflang instead of canonical tags, because /es/ and /en/ will not be duplicate content once they're translated.
Read this Q&A from Google for details - https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q20
-
Hey Jose,
If you have an /es/ subfolder then ideally you would be translating that content to Spanish, not canonicalizing that content back to the English version.
I can see from http://www.spain-internship.com/es/internships-in-salamanca that not all /es/ pages are translated - is this true across the entire website?
If you don't have any Spanish content, then you should just kill off the /es/ version entirely.
-
Hi there,
Thanks for the update. Now that you told me the problem I found out this is a known bug for joomla and I am working on it.
I found a plugin http://styleware.eu/store/item/26-styleware-content-canonical-plugin that sends all the duplicated urls, generated automatically with a canonical to the home.Sample:
http://www.spain-internship.com/en/home/149-all-en/placement-spain
Now with the link http://www.spain-internship.com" rel="canonical" />.This solves the problem of the core canonical bug.
Would this be a proper solution?Now I only have to change all the ones duplicated due to languages config, block then in robots or canonical but as far as I control it, it is ok.
Please, let me know if this would be a proper solution.
Thank you in advance for your help, if I can help you in some moment with something here we are!
-
Ok, the problem is your pages are all canonical to themselves, the canonical tag should point at the main page for the content, not to every page. For your first example, all pages that get their content from http://www.spain-internship.com/en need to have canonical tags to that page, instead the copy page has this:
href="http://www.spain-internship.com/fi/etusivu/186-all-fi/home-page-fi" rel="canonical" />
it should have
href="http://www.spain-internship.com/fi/" rel="canonical" />
-
I will provide few so you can look!
Detected as duplicated:
http://www.spain-internship.com/en
http://www.spain-internship.com/en/home/149-all-en/placement-spainSame here:
http://www.spain-internship.com/fi
http://www.spain-internship.com/fi/etusivu/186-all-fi/home-page-fihttp://www.spain-internship.com/en/internships-in-salamanca
http://www.spain-internship.com/es/internships-in-salamancaFirst one is the original. The rest one have canonical. Still detected as duplicated.
-
Do you have an example of one of these generated pages as well, everything looks fine on the main page.
-
Hey,
Yes, sure.
This is the duplicated from the /en
http://www.spain-internship.com/en/home/149-all-en/placement-spain
Thanks!
-
Do you have a link to one of these pages so we can look at how it is deploying the canonical onto the page.
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
-
Problem with third party cookies while using MOZ?
Hello, I am using Moz Pro and I am happy to have this tool for my SEO work. But I am having a little problem while working on my blog site https://thepoolparadise.com/ some times the Moz does not work and asks to allow third-party cookies, wherein the settings third-party cookies are always allowed. Please guide me in this matter. Thank you.
Link Explorer | | Niujbuj760 -
Why moz is not crawling my Backlinks & Keyword ?
Hello all brother & sisters, I want to know why moz bot crawler are not detected my backlinks & keyword from last 3-4 months not even single one. All other SEO crawler less popular than moz are detecting my keyword & backlinks. May I know is there any option to forcefully moz bot to crawl my all site specially.
Link Explorer | | loknath.tcms1 -
My site links to my clients not showing in Moz
I've got a web design business with a site that's been out there for 17 years - www.biztoolsone.com. I've got links to my clients' sites in my portfolio page. The backlinks list for my clients, when I check them in Moz, don't show the links from this site. They always showed in the list until a few months ago. The site has a DA of 59 & PA (for home page) of 50. The spam score is 0/17. I'm having a tough time telling my clients that the Moz backlinks list is accurate when that site doesn't show in the list. The same is true for www.fayettevillenc.biz - this is one I created years ago to generate backlinks. It's got a spam score of 4/17, so I'm a little more understanding of that one. Thanks for any guidance!
Link Explorer | | wcksmith10 -
Does the Moz Pro site crawl, crawl password protected sites?
So i asked Moz Pro site crawl to crawl my page, and a lot of issues came up - but for password protected sites. Does the Moz Pro site crawl do this? A lot of the issues, are not relevant for a site that is password protected.
Link Explorer | | Minlaering.dk0 -
Angular SPA & MOZ Crawl Issues
Website: https://www.exambazaar.com/ Issue: Domain Authority & Page Authority 1/100 I am using Prerender to cache/render static pages to crawl agents but MOZ is not able to crawl through my website (https://www.exambazaar.com/). Hence I think it has a domain authority of 1/100. I have been in touch with Prerender support to find a fix for the same and have also added dotbot to the list of crawler agents in addition to Prerender default list which includes rogerbot. Do you have any suggestions to fix this? List: https://github.com/prerender/prerender-node/commit/5e9044e3f5c7a3bad536d86d26666c0d868bdfff Adding dotbot to Express Server:
Link Explorer | | gparashar
prerender.crawlerUserAgents.push('dotbot');0 -
Learn how to use Moz's Spam Score metric to identify high risk links. Get your Daily SEO Fix.
Almost every site has a few bad links pointing to it but risky links can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. Watch The Moz Daily SEO Fix: How to Use Spam Score to Identify High Risk Links to learn how to spot those spammy links and what to do with them. And, if you have more questions about Spam Score, check out Rand’s blog post: "Spam Score: Moz’s New Metric to Measure Penalization Risk." This video is part of The Moz Daily SEO Fix tutorial series--Moz tool tips and tricks in under 2 minutes. To watch all of our videos so far, and to subscribe to future ones, make sure to visit the Daily SEO Fix channel on YouTube.
Link Explorer | | kellyjcoop3 -
How often are Moz Domain authority and Page Authority Metrics Refreshed?
How often are the MOZ metrics of DA and PA refreshed, this is because i have noticed when i conduct an Inbound link analysis of my blog, i realize that MOZ is merely detecting around 100+ only links to what is being detected on Google Webmaster Tools, any advise?
Link Explorer | | ConnectMedia0 -
Does Moz have anything similar to ahrefs batch analysis tool?
I am wanting to do analysis of a whole bunch of URLs at once - i know ahrefs already has a very good tool for this - but I don't really want to have to pay the $79 a month if moz has something similar? I know it has the OSE. Can I do batch analysis in this? Thanks
Link Explorer | | SWD.Advertising1