Self referencing canonicals AND duplicate URLs. Have I set them up correctly?
-
Hi team,
We've recently redesigned our website.
Originally we had separate product listings for every product. Even if there was one design in two colours, each colour had its own listing.
With the redesign we merged all of these identical products to help with duplicate content. Customers can now browse the different stone colours available in that design from a single product listing (bottom left of screen under 'select a stone' on a product page)
When the customer changes the stone colour, the product images change to the new colour and its product code is appended to the end of the existing URL. eg:
http://www.mountainjade.co.nz/necklaces/assorted-jades-open-koru-necklace-jc1725/ (original listing)
http://www.mountainjade.co.nz/necklaces/assorted-jades-open-koru-necklace-jc1725/?sku=JC1725BL (black selected)
We have the following self referencing canonicals on all product pages [current-page:url:absolute], yet MOZ is telling me I have alot of duplicate content on pages with the above example.
Have I implemented the canonicals correctly? Is this why Moz is flagging the listings as duplicate?
-
If you've got that path anywhere in your navigation or other internal linking, you'd want to remove that or update it to /shop/necklaces/. The next step would be to 301 redirect /shop/necklaces/necklace/ to /shop/necklaces/ just in case you've got any links pointing to it - this will get your users where they want to go and also let search engines know you've relocated the page.
-
One last question,
How exactly would I remove /shop/necklaces/necklace/?
Sorry if that's a stupid question. I just want to know a bit more before I take it to our dev.
Thanks.
-
Thanks for this Logan!
I really appreciate the help.
-
As Yossi said, configuring parameters in Search Console should help - _but, _that's only going to help you out in Google.
Adding a disallow for those parameters in the robots file will help solve the problem in other search engines.
The thin content is definitely contributing as well. Moz identifies dupes based on a source code match between any two pages of 90% or higher. When you consider all your template code is the same across every page, thin content isn't enough to differentiate the source code.
I also noticed on one of those screenshots that you got a one dupe of /shop/necklaces/ and /shop/necklaces/necklace/. If you can, I recommend removing that second one with doubled up 'necklace' folders, that's going to cause a lot of dupes as well.
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for looking into the canonicals for me. I'm glad to hear they appear to be configured correctly.
There are alot of duplicate page issues, with 109 in total at the moment.
Some are similar to the above example, some are URLS that contain refined search parameters (price, design etc), but most are just products which are almost identical. I think this is because most product pages have thin generic content, so for those examples we're in the process of writing unique product descriptions and adding unique imagery.
I've attached a few screenshot if you'd like to take a look. Your thoughts would be much appreciated
-
Thanks so much for the reply Yossi.
Great tip about using GSC URL parameter tools. I'll definitely implement that.
Appreciate it.
Jake
-
Jacob, as Logan wrote it looks like the canonicals are good to go.. (i just did a small sampling though..)
Not sure how your URLs are set but if the "sku=XXX" parameters are used only for color variations of a specific product, then you can use the URL paramater setting in Google Search Console.This will make your life easier, and it will ensure that no duplicate content is crawled by Google. But URL parameters must be used with caution
good luck
Yossi -
Hi Jacob,
I took a look at your site, and the canonicals appear to be configured correctly. When you look at your duplicates in the Site Crawl report in Moz, and you click the + next to where it says "1 duplicate", what are you seeing? Is it a URL set like the example you've used above, or something else?
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
-
Duplicate content analysis
Hi all,We have some pages being flagged as duplicates by the google search console. However, we believe the content on these pages is distinctly different (for example, they have completely different search results returned, different headings etc). An example of two pages google finds to be duplicates is below. if anyone can spot what might be causing the duplicate issue here, would very much appreciate suggestions! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
Examples: https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/IFA-financial-advisor-mortgage/harborne
https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/accountant/harborne0 -
Duplicate content: using the robots meta tag in conjunction with the canonical tag?
We have a WordPress instance on an Apache subdomain (let's say it's blog.website.com) alongside our main website, which is built in Angular. The tech team is using Akamai to do URL rewrites so that the blog posts appear under the main domain (website.com/more-keywords/here). However, due to the way they configured the WordPress install, they can't do a wildcard redirect under htaccess to force all the subdomain URLs to appear as subdirectories, so as you might have guessed, we're dealing with duplicate content issues. They could in theory do manual 301s for each blog post, but that's laborious and a real hassle given our IT structure (we're a financial services firm, so lots of bureaucracy and regulation). In addition, due to internal limitations (they seem mostly political in nature), a robots.txt file is out of the question. I'm thinking the next best alternative is the combined use of the robots meta tag (no index, follow) alongside the canonical tag to try to point the bot to the subdirectory URLs. I don't think this would be unethical use of either feature, but I'm trying to figure out if the two would conflict in some way? Or maybe there's a better approach with which we're unfamiliar or that we haven't considered?
Technical SEO | | prasadpathapati0 -
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
Hello, I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
Technical SEO | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Some URLs in the sitemap not indexed
Our company site has hundreds of thousands of pages. Yet no matter how big or small the total page count, I have found that the "URLs Indexed" in GWMT has never matched "URLS in Sitemap". When we were small and now that we have a LOT more pages, there is always a discrepancy of ~10% or so missing from the index. It's difficult to know which pages are not indexed, but I have found some that I can verify are in the Sitemap.xml file but not at all in the index. When I go to GWMT I can "Fetch and Render" missing pages fine - it's not as though it's blocked or inaccessible. Any ideas on why this is? Is this type of discrepancy typical?
Technical SEO | | Mase0 -
Redirecting Canonical Hostnames
Hi, I want to rewrite all the url pages of "site.com" to "www.site.com". I read the moz redirection article and i concluded that this would be the best approach. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.seomoz.org [NC]
Technical SEO | | bigrat95
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seomoz.org/$1 [L,R=301]. But i recieved this error: Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. I tried this rewrite too... RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [L,R=301] It worked but it just rewriting my domain** "site.com"** and not all the subs "site.com/fr/example.php" to "www.site.com" Why it doesn't work properly, it seem to be easy... Could it be a hosting problem? Is there another way to do it? <address> </address> <address> </address> <address> </address> <address> </address>0 -
URL spacing help
Hi all, easy question: I have a client URL...example.com/giftbags that has been indexed for a while. Should I change the URL to example.com/gift-bags to separate these words for better KW ranking, or would the change be useless at this point? Thanks, -Reed
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Duplicate Content
Many of the pages on my site are similar in structure/content but not exactly the same. What amount of content should be unique for Google to not consider it duplicate? If it is something like 50% unique would it be preferable to choose one page as the canonical instead of keeping them both as separate pages?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate homepage content
Hi, I recently did a site crawl using seomoz crawl test My homepage seems to have 3 cases of duplicate content.. These are the urls www.example.ie/ www.example..ie/%5B%7E19%7E%5D www.example..ie/index.htm Does anyone have any advise on this? What impact does this have on my seo?
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0
