Multiple Instances of the Same Article
-
Hi, I'm having a problem I cannot solve about duplicate article postings.
As you will see from the attached images, I have a page with multiple variants of the same URL in google index and as well as duplicate title tag in the search console of webmasters tools. Its been several months I have been using canonical meta tags to resolve the issue, aka declare all variants to point to a single URL, however the problem remains. Its not just old articles that stay like that, even new articles show the same behaviour right when they are published even thought they are presented correctly with canonical links and sitemap as you will see from the example bellow.
Example URLs of the attached Image
-
All URLs belonging to the same article ID, have the same canonical link inside the html head.
-
Also because I have a separate mobile site, I also include in every desktop URL an "alternate" link to the mobile site.
-
At the Mobile Version of the Site, I have another canonical link, pointing back to the original Desktop URL. So the mobile site article version also has
-
Now, when it comes to the xml sitemap, I pass only the canonical URL and none of the other possible variants (to avoid multiple indexing), and I also point to the mobile version of the article.
<url><loc>http://www.neakriti.gr/?page=newsdetail&DocID=1300357</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://mobile.neakriti.gr/fullarticle.php?docid=1300357"><lastmod>2016-02-20T21:44:05Z</lastmod>
<priority>0.6</priority>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
image:imageimage:lochttp://www.neakriti.gr/NewsASSET/neakriti-news-image.aspx?Doc=1300297</image:loc>
image:titleΟΦΗ</image:title></image:image></xhtml:link></url>
The above Sitemap snippet Source: http://www.neakriti.gr/WebServices/sitemap.aspx?&year=2016&month=2
The main sitemap of the website: http://www.neakriti.gr/WebServices/sitemap-index.aspxDespite my efforts you see that webmasters tools reports three variants for the desktop URL, and google search reports 4 URLs (3 different desktop variant urls and the mobile url).
I get this when I type the article code to see if what is indexed in google search: site:neakriti.gr 1300297
So far I believe I have done all I could in order to resolve the issue by addressing canonical links and alternate links, as well as correct sitemap.xml entry. I don't know what else to do... This was done several months ago and there is absolutelly no improvement.
Here is a more recent example of an article added 5 days ago (10-April-2016), just type
site:neakriti.gr 1300357
at google search and you will see the variants of the same article in google cache. Open the google cached page, and you will see the cached pages contain canonical link, but google doesn't obey the direction given there.Please help!
-
-
Hi all,
sorry for the delay, I am away on a business trip, this is why I stopped communicating the past few days.
I can confirm that the latest entries (those after March) come as a single instance.
However there are some minor exceptions like the one hereExample of a recent article indexed in both desktop (even though desktop url is not the canonical) and mobile URL
https://www.google.gr/search?q=site:neakriti.gr&biw=1527&bih=899&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIxODGt5_MAhUsKpoKHdcUAkYQ_AUIBigA&dpr=1.1#q=site:neakriti.gr+1315539&tbs=qdr:w&filter=0Also I noticed that with the "alternate" and "canonical" links the mobile version of the site doesn't get indexed anymore (with minor exceptions like the one above).
-
Hi Ioannis!
How's this going? We'd love an update.
-
Hmm, interestingly, when I followed your link, I only saw the canonical version of the article. Is this what you're seeing now?
Also, in response to your earlier question, yes, you can disallow parameters with robots.txt. If these canonical issues continue, that may be the best next step.
-
Thank you for your response, I will take a look at this.
However I have two questions regarding your suggestion
- Since I have canonical links at the loading page, doesn't that resolve the issue?
- the printerfriendly variation has a noindex meta at the head, shouldn't that be taken into account?
- Can I put regular expressions in my robots.txt? How can I block url params? Because printerfriendly and newsdetailsports are values of the "page" GET param
Infact the printerfriendly contains canonical link and noindex meta to inform search engines not to index content, and let them know where the original content exists
-
Hi there
The printer friendly URL is coming from the print this article button (attached) and the /default.aspx URL is coming from the ^ TOP button (attached).
What you could do is use your robots.txt to ignore these URLs. You can all tell Google what URL parameters to ignore, but please be EXTREMELY careful doing this. It's not a fine comb tool, not a hatchet.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments, good luck!
Patrick
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
-
Multiple h1 tags on this html 5 page a issue?
Hi Guys, I have a html5 page located here: https://tinyurl.com/yc6s3xs2 I know from some online discussions having multiple h1 tags on HTML 5 pages like this, shouldn't be an issue. Any thoughts on this? Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Article page canonicalization
Hey there, A client rents all kinds of party articles, like plates, bowles, etc. Currently, al his article pages have canonicals to their parent category pages, supposedly to have any pagevalue flow to these category pages, (which are much more relevant for SEO). Is there anyone who agrees with this method? I think a noindex,follow would be a better measure to prevent Google from accessing all these 'low value' article pages. Besides, a canonical should indicate that page A and B are (almost) identical, which they most certainly are not in this case. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/ setting tag pages as blog corner stone article?
We do not have enough content rich page to target all of our keywords. Because of that My SEO guy wants to set some corner stone blog articles in order to rank them for certain key words on Google. He is asking me to use the following rule in our article writing(We have blog on our website):
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian
For example in our articles when we use keyword "wolf", link them to the blog page:
https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/
It seems like a good idea because in the tag page there are lots of material with the Keyword "wolf" . But the problem is when I search for keyword "wolf" for example on the Google, some other blog pages are ranked higher than this tag page. But he tells me in long run it is a better strategy. Any idea on this?0 -
Multiple, Partial Redirecting URLs from old SEO company
Received quite a surprise when I gained access to the Google webmaster account and saw 4 domains that are link to my clients domain and the number of links for each domain range between 10,000 and 90,000. Come to find out this was a result of their former agency. The business is very local central. I will use the example of a burger place. They main site is burgers.com and burger places are listed by city and state. Their former agency bought several domains like californiaburgers.com and duplicated the listings for that state on this domain. You can view certain pages of the second domain, but the home page is redirected as are most of the city pages with 301s to the main burgers.com domain. However, there are pages on the additional domains that do not redirect, as they are not duplicated on the main domain so nowhere to redirect. Google has only found four of them but looks like there could be at least 50. Pages that are not redirected are indexed by the engines - but not ranking (at least not well). There is a duplicate content issue, although "limited" in the sense that it really is just the name of the business, address and phone number - there is not much to these listings. What is the best approach to overcome? Right now GWT is showing over 300,000 links, however at least 150,000 to 200,000 of that is from these domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeverSEO0 -
Duplicate content throughout multiple URLs dilemma
We have a website with lots of categories and there are problems that some subcategories have identical content on them. So, is it enough to just add different text on those problematic subcategories or we need to use "canonical" tag to main category. Same dilemma is with our search system and duplicate content. For example, "/category/sports" URL would have similar to identical content with "/search/sports" and "/search/sports-fitness/" URLs. Ranking factors is important for all different categories and subcategories. Ranking factors is also important for search individual keywords. So, the question is, how to make them somehow unique/different to rank on all those pages well? Would love to hear advices how it can be solved using different methods and how it would affect our rankings. When we actually need to use "canonical" tag and when 301 redirect is better. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | versliukai0 -
One Business-Multiple Services
Hello Everyone, I was looking for some strategies for doing SEO on a site that offers multiple services. Here is the example: There is one company with ONE physical address. They perform the following services: Pest Control Mold Remediation Home Inspections Waterproofing They also handle these services in several surronding cities. They want to maintain one website for branding purposes. Obviously I will create individual pages on their site for each service but was wondering how diffiuclut it will be to rank one website for these various services. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0