Is Moz Bot Broken?

[DIAMA]

Moz Bot says I have millions of issues with duplicate content.

One item says that it has over 50 duplicates! I downloaded the CSV it gave me to look into it.

All of my products have many different ways to get them, so I've set up rel=canonicals for the master one. So, I'd assume Mozbot would ignore those.

But the interesting thing I've found is that of these 50 duplicates, some of them (on the same CSV I downloaded) are completely different products, with completely different URL's. and completely different titles and completely different meta descriptions and completely different product descriptions.

So, 3 questions:

1. Is Moz bot broken?

2. Does it not recognize canonicals?

3. Why is it seeing 3 very different products as exactly the same product?

I'm so confused and since I work for a national company, the only way I can give actual examples is through a private message session. I guess I'm wondering if anyone else has come across this issue? Because I'm completely baffled.

[DIAMA]

Hello David,

Thanks for the response. I was able to receive a response in Chat yesterday that was very similar. All of the different URL's for the same product were pointing to the same canonical (the right one), so I was highly confused. Knowing that it's about Source Code helps a lot. Giant ecommerce sites like the one I'm working for it seems would have this issue more than smaller, boutique sites.

All of the products have their own unique product descriptions and titles & meta descriptions. So, for our brand, it is about the source code. I can suggest that the writers add more copy to their descriptions, but I can't imagine that will be a fun conversation.

I really appreciate the thoughtful answer to my question. Thanks so much!

[DavidLee]

Hello!

Our campaigns have 90% tolerance for duplicate content so this means if the page source code is at least 90% similar, it will be flagged.

Canonicals will only work if all pages that are truly identical each point to the same canonical URL

So if you have something like www.domain.com/productA/ as the primary URL for a single product

All 3 URLs below need to point to "www.domain.com/productA/" as the canonical

www.domain.com/productA/color=blue
www.domain.com/productA/category/tag
www.domain.com/productA/page1

For another product www.domain/productB/

These will always report as a duplicate of productA if there isn't enough unique content to prevent them from being too similar due to the layout/template making up the majority of the source code.

For pages that are completely targeting separate products, those cannot be ignored so it will help to add more unique content to those pages to prevent getting flagged.

Here is a great article on how you can address duplicates for a site like yours: www.goinflow.com/duplicate-content-ecommerce-seo/

Hope this helps!