Canonical tags and SEOmoz crawls
-
Hi there. Recently, we've made some changes to http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ to implement canonical tags to some dynamically generated pages to stop duplicate content issues. Previously, these were blocked with robots.txt. In Webmaster Tools, everything looks great - pages crawled has shot up, and overall traffic and sales has seen a positive increase. However the SEOmoz crawl report is now showing a huge increase in duplicate content issues. What I'd like to know is whether SEOmoz registers a canonical tag as preventing a piece of duplicate content, or just adds to it the notices report. That is, if I have 10 pages of duplicate content all with correct canonical tags, will I still see 10 errors in the crawl, but also 10 notices showing a canonical has been found? Or, should it be 0 duplicate content errors, but 10 notices of canonicals? I know it's a small point, but it could potentially have a big difference. Thanks!
-
Thanks guys. That's what I suspected, but obviously I wanted to be sure before I went to the client.
-
I have raised this to the seomoz team a few times - it's a work in progress still. they are getting better, but my site still shows the same issues - duplicate content errors that even the semoz support team agree aren't really an issue because of canonical tags.
I suggest just ignoring that for now and waiting for an update.
-
I am actually unsure if SEOMoz's crawl report does not necessarily take into account all the ways duplicate content can be fixed. Another thing that will create a similar affect is when you use Google webmaster tools to handle parameter handling. I don't think it's as big of an issue to just have these popup in your crawl report. We use these crawl reports as indicators to help us identify these issues. If you've fixed the issues with best practice and seen positive results in the search engines that's really what matters.
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
-
Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
Moz Pro | | NichGunn0 -
Why would SEOmoz be blocked from a domain?
Am I missing something? I'm trying to do Link Research on www.weddingcarsofhampshire.co.uk but it seems to be blocked, any ideas why that would be the case?
Moz Pro | | JemRobinson0 -
Crawl Diagnostics Warnings - Duplicate Content
Hi All, I am getting a lot of warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some news stories or blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Should I ask google not to index the tag pages? Does it really affect my site? Thanks
Moz Pro | | skehoe0 -
Crawl diagnostic Notices for rel Canonical increased
Hello, We just signed up for SEO Moz, and are reviewing the results of our second web crawl. Our Errors and Warnings summary have been reduced, but our Notices for Rel Canonical have skyrocketed from 300 to over 5,500. We are using a WP with the Headway theme and our pages already have the rel=canonical along wiht rel=author. Any ideas why this number would go up so much in one week? Thank you, Michael
Moz Pro | | MKaloud0 -
How to Stop SEOMOZ from Crawling a Sub-domain without redoing the whole campaign?
I am using SEOMOZ for a client to track their website's performance and fix any errors and issues. A few weeks ago, they created a sub-domain (sub.example.com) to create a niche website for some of their specialized content. However, when SEOMOZ re-crawled the main domain (example.com), it also reported the errors for the subdomain. Is there any way to stop SEOMOZ from crawling the subdomain and only crawl the main domain? I know that can be done by starting a new campaign, but is there any way to work around an existing campaign? I'm asking because we would like to avoid the setting up the campaign again and losing the historical data as well. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | TheNorthernOffice790 -
SEOmoz Pro dashboard report question
Hi there, SEOMoz dashbard report shows 'URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search' - Is it counting only organic searches or all searches including PPC? Thanks, Gemma
Moz Pro | | RBA0 -
Dismiss crawl diagnostics error
Hello everyone, Is there a way to dismiss some errors in the Crawl Diagnostics tool so they don't appear again? It happens so that some of the errors are never going to be fixed because of their nature. For example, 'Title too long' errors that point to some of the threads on my forum - it doesn't make sense to change the title of a thread posted by user just for the sake of the error disappearing from the 'Crawl Diagnostics' tool. 🙂 Otherwise the CD interface gets a little bit cluttered with errors which I will never fix anyway. I wonder how others deal with this problem. Thanks.
Moz Pro | | MaratM0 -
SEOmoz application suggestion
I would like to suggest the ranking changes be broken into two categories, You and Competition, right now it seems everything is lumped in together... Screen shot attached. Thanks. A24tp.jpg
Moz Pro | | CouponCactus0