Duplicate Pages #!
-
Hi guys,
Currently have duplicate pages accross a website e.g.
The only difference is the URL 1 has a hashtag and exclamation tag. Everything else is the same.
We were thinking of adding rel canonical tags on the #! versions of the page to the correct URLs. But Google doens't seem to be indexing the #! versions anyway.
Does anyone know why this is the case? If Google is not indexing them, is there any point adding rel canonical tags?
Cheers,
Chris
-
Hi,
In most cases having duplicate content is not going to punish/hurt you in terms of SEO (unless it's deceptive content) - see https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en
It remains however best practice to make sure that content on only one unique url - the example you give seems to be a text book example of 'when to use canonicals' - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
The fact that Google doesn't seem to index the #! pages is probably related to the fact that these pages have few incoming links and that it's making the correct guess that these duplicate pages are not really important. You should also take into account that the site: command is not necessarily giving you all the pages that are indexed.
Long answer to confirm that you better add the canonical.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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
-
Wordpress pages posts
Say you have a WordPress website with reviews and lists. Would you use "post" or "page" type for them? Is there any SEO advantage in using pages/subpages instead of posts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabx1 -
Validated pages on GSC displays 5x more pages than when performing site:domain.com?
Hi mozzers, When checking the coverage report on GSC I am seeing over 649,000 valid pages https://cl.ly/ae46ec25f494 but when performing site:domain.com I am only seeing 130,000 pages. Which one is more the source of truth especially I have checked some of these "valid" pages and noticed they're not even indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
Does Google View "SRC", "HREF", TITLE and Alt tags as Duplicate Content on Home Page Slider?
Greetings MOZ Community. A keyword matrix was developed by my SEO firm. I am in the process of integrating primary, secondary and terciary phrases into the text and am also sprinkling three or four other terms. Using a keyword density tool (http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php) the results were somewhat unexpected after I optimized. So I then looked at the source code and noticed text from HREF, ALT and SRC tags that may be effecting how Google would interpret text on the page. Our home page (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains a slider with commercial real estate listings. Would Google index the SRC, HREF, TITLE and ALT tags in these slider items? Would this be detrimental to SEO? The code for one listing (and there are 7-8 in the slider) looks like this: | href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York">Class A Fifth Avenue Offices class="blockLeft"><a< p=""></a<> href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York"> src="http://dr0nu3l9a17ym.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/fsrep/houses/125x100/305.jpg" alt="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York" width="125" height="94" /> 1,340 Sq. Ft. $5,918 / month Fifth Avenue Midtown / Grand Central <a< p=""></a<> | Could the repetition of the title text ("lease a Prestigious Fifth...") trigger a duplicate content penalty? Should the slider content be blocked or set to no-index by some kind of a Java script? We have worked very hard to optimize the home page so it would be a real shame if through some technical oversight we got hit by a Google Panda penalty. Thanks, Alan Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Category Pages For Distributing Authority But Not Creating Duplicate Content
I read this interesting moz guide: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt, which I think answered my question but I just want to make sure. I take it to mean that if I have category pages with nothing but duplicate content (lists of other pages (h1 title/on-page description and links to same) and that I still want the category pages to distribute their link authority to the individual pages, then I should leave the category pages in the site map and meta noindex them, rather than robots.txt them. Is that correct? Again, don't want the category pages to index or have a duplicate content issue, but do want the category pages to be crawled enough to distribute their link authority to individual pages. Given the scope of the site (thousands of pages and hundreds of categories), I just want to make sure I have that right. Up until my recent efforts on this, some of the category pages have been robot.txt'd out and still in the site map, while others (with different url structure) have been in the sitemap, but not robots.txt'd out. Thanks! Best.. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Why does SEOmoz bot see duplicate pages despite I am using the canonical tag?
Hello here, today SEOmoz bot found and marked as "duplicate content" the following pages on my website: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3 http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf And I am wondering why considering the fact I am using on both those pages a canonical tag pointing to the main product page below: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html Shouldn't SEOmoz bot follow the canonical directive and not report those two pages as duplicate? Thank you for any insights I am probably missing here!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Page Authority Issue
My home page http://www.musicliveuk.com has a domain authority of 42 and page authority of 52. However I have set up other pages on the site to optimise for one keyword per page as I thought this was best practice. For example http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-bands targets 'wedding band' but this has a page authority of 24 way below my competitors. Having used the keyword difficulty tool on here it appears that is why I am struggling to rank highly (number 9). This is the same problem for several of my main keywords. I am building links to this and other pages in order to increase their authority and eventually rank highly but am I not better off optimising my home page that already has a good page authority and would probably out rank my competitors? Or am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Duplication Issue?
One of our copywriters has just written a blog to be posted on our own company blog to be reviewed by myself, however I had noticed that the blog post has some duplication issues with one of our own product pages, about 60% duplication, is it still worth posting? Will search engines still index the blog post? Kind Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0