Multiple Instances of the Same Article

[ioannisa]

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

1. All URLs belonging to the same article ID, have the same canonical link inside the html head.

2. Also because I have a separate mobile site, I also include in every desktop URL an "alternate" link to the mobile site.

3. 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

4. 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.aspx

Despite 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!

duplicate-articles.jpg duplicate-articles-in-index.jpg

[ioannisa]

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 here

Example 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=0

Also 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).

[MattRoney]

Hi Ioannis!

How's this going? We'd love an update.

[KristinaKledzik]

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.

[ioannisa]

Thank you for your response, I will take a look at this.

However I have two questions regarding your suggestion

1. Since I have canonical links at the loading page, doesn't that resolve the issue?
2. the printerfriendly variation has a noindex meta at the head, shouldn't that be taken into account?
3. 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

[PatrickDelehanty]

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

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