Duplicate Content Mystery

[Ecom-Team-Access]

Hi Moz community!

I have an ongoing duplicate mystery going on here and I'm hoping someone here can answer my question.

We have an Ecommerce site that has a variety of product pages and category pages. There are Rel canonicals in place, along with parameters in GWT, and there are also URL rewrites.

Here are some scenarios, maybe you can give insight as to what’s exactly going on and how to fix it.

All the duplicates look to be coming from category pages specifically.

For example:
This link re-writes:

http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html?cat=407&color=152&price=20-

To:

http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html

The rel canonical tag looks like this:

http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html" />

The CONTENT is different, but the URLs are the same. It thinks that the product category view is the same as the all products view, even though there is a canonical in there telling it which one is the original. Some of them don’t have anything to do with each other.

Take a look:

Link identified as duplicate:

http://www.incipio.com/cases/smartphone-cases/htc-smartphone-cases/htc-windows-phone-8x-cases.html?color=27&price=20-

Link this is a duplicate of:

http://www.incipio.com/cases/macbook-cases/macbook-pro-13in-cases.html

Any idea as to what could be happening here?

[donford]

Hi Ishwar,

If you have done so yet it would be best to create your own post. Many people pop in here to help others and when they see this topic as answered they may not look at it. Creating your own post will get the most attention.

[donford]

Hi Nicole,

Okay so the reason I stated that it appears something is improperly installed is due to the fact a page should in general have 1 head tag, 1 title tag, 1 body tag and 1 document type declaration. Your page has the normal ones you'd expect to see plus another set.

In the code I posted above you have an Iframe, which is basically a tag that says display information from a different source. In this case it is Google, which is fine but it should not contain another set of head, title, and body tags along with a document declaration. Google would never do that. This along with my years of experience looking at and installing ad-ons leads me to believe that something was installed incorrectly or at the very least not coded correctly.

As to the misconfiguration issue, I would look first at how my url rewrites are being done as there is no viable reason the first link you posted should rewrite to a url and serve different content than what is suppose to be there. That tells me that the re-writes are being incorrectly handled.

I hope that helps a little,

Don

[navneetkumar786]

Hello Moz Communtiy!

i am also having error of Duplicate Tag Content Mystery like:

http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/blog-post/

http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/effective-blog-post/

Pages are same. I have 100+ Error on website so how can i remove this error? DO you have any tutorial based on this?

Can i change canonical url at once or i need to set it one by one

[Ecom-Team-Access]

Hi Donford,

Thanks so much for getting back to me. Great answer! I'd like some clarification here. I did not configure this and if I'm going to talk to the developer, I'd like to have more knowledge to speak to it.

Could you please clarify what you mean when you say:

• It looks like something is installed and configured improperly.
• You have 2 head tags on the page that shows up from the redirect.
• This is actually inside the first head tag complete with a body tag and another doc declaration.

I looked at the example you sent, but I'm not sure what I'm looking at. If you could explain those bullet points in more detail, it would greatly help.

You're the best!

Thanks,

Nicole

[donford]

It looks like something is installed and configured improperly.

You have 2 head tags on the page that shows up from the redirect.

This is actually inside the first head tag complete with a body tag and another doc declaration.

<iframe id="oauth2relay579972146" name="oauth2relay579972146" src="https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/postmessageRelay?parent=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.incipio.com#rpctoken=728288212&forcesecure=1" style="width: 1px; height: 1px; position: absolute; top: -100px;" tabindex="-1">

<html><head><title>title><meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type"><meta content="IE=edge" http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible"><meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=0" name="viewport"><script src="https://apis.google.com/js/api.js" type="text/javascript" gapi_processed="true"><script src="https://oauth.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/js/core:rpc:shindig.random:shindig.sha1.js?c=2" type="text/javascript"><script src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/accounts/o/3417060037-postmessagerelay.js">head><body>html>iframe>

That looks like an installation issue.

• Now the misconfiguration issue would have to be why the URL re-writes to page but serves up different content.

• And lastly I think even if you fix those issues you're still going to get duplicate content warnings because you have very thin content on pages.

• Example: Page 1 http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves/amazon-kindle-fire-hd-6-cases.html

• Example: Page 2 http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves/amazon-kindle-fire-hd-7-cases.html

• On those 2 pages there is a 1 character difference 6 instead of 7. All the other content (header & footer) and 1 letter difference. Than if you go to the actual product page you have the exact same issue same description to the letter except the one number. Yep, you're going to have a duplicate content problem.

• This is something that all e-commerce stores face. You honestly need to write unique content for each and every product you sell. Don't copy & paste stuff from another site like Amazon or the manufacturers site, write your own content.

• In summation, I would recheck any modules/ad-ons/plug-ins you installed as one appears to be incorrect. if that doesn't' fix the re-write issue have a developer that is familiar with your ecommerce platform look at this issue. Lastly, you got to have unique content.

• Maybe not the best news but I hope it helps

• Don

Edit in bullet points to try and make the post a look a little better.  These forums don't take kindly to adding code blocks