Pagination & duplicate meta
-
Hi
I have a few pages flagged for duplicate meta e.g.:
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenchesI can;t see anything wrong with the pagination & other pages have the same code, but aren't flagged for duplicate:
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets?page=2
I can't see to find the issue - any ideas?
Becky
-
Regarding the links which point to pages, but include the hash. If Google is only seeing this page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches
Will it be seeing these as pages which have duplicate content?
-
No problem thank you
-
I could write out how to implements rel next prev but it would be better to look at these articles
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
https://moz.com/ugc/seo-guide-to-google-webmaster-recommendations-for-pagination
-
Hi,
Yes there is javascript to sort the results on those pages.
Is the solution to have these URLs page=2 etc, correctly linked from the page number?
Then ensure rel/prev are used correctly?
I'm also concerned about the content we have at the bottom of the products being shown as duplicate.
-
Hi
Thank you for this. One thing I am confused about is, if Google doesn't crawl those paginated pages, why will it pick up the meta as duplicate?
Thank you for highlighting the links - I hadn't noticed this before.
Where should the rel next prev be coded?
Thanks for your feedback
-
I get how hashes work.
Crawlers do see the page=2, page=3, etc. URLs because the right/left navigation buttons to the side of the numbers link to them. I just proved this by crawling the site in Screaming Frog and doing a search for page=, they're all found.
Becky, there's something larger at play here, potentially with your CMS configuration. It looks like the navigation for paginated sections is messed up. Mouse-over the links and look at the URL in the lower left of your browser, and then click the link and look at your URL bar. The results are very different from what you see on mouse-over. I'd recommend your first step is to talk to your developers and see if they can fix this issue. As VivaCa mentioned, you could be getting false alarms on duplicates here from Moz, so you might be clear with the canonical and prev/next fix - Screaming Frog finds all of those tags properly.
-
I think you guys are missing the point. Anything after the hashtag is ignored. As far as the crawler is concerned, all the links to page 2,3,4,5 are all the same URL - that is why the crawler does not see the other pages.
There is no issue with canonical or how it interacts with the rel next prev. My point on the canonical was simply for illustrative purposes and looks to be implemented correctly.
Separate from the canonical the rel next prevs are setup incorrectly and that needs to be fixed once the issue with how the paginated pages are linked to using the URL with the hashtag parameters.
-
We have the exact same issue, and I found this reply from Dr. Pete helpful regarding this (assuming that what he says is still true): https://moz.com/community/q/pagination-issues-on-e-commerce-site-duplicate-page-title-and-content-on-moz-crawl
His reply:
Unfortunately, Moz Analytics/PRO don't process rel=prev/next properly at this time, so we may give false alarms on those pages, even if the tags are properly implemented.
It can be tricky, but Google recommends a combination of rel=canonical and rel=prev/next. Use the canonical tag to keep sorts from getting indexed, and then use rel=prev/next for the pagination itself. Your 3rd example (page=2...) should rel=prev/next to the URLs before and after it but then canonical to the page=2 variation with no sort parameter. It can get complicated fast, unfortunately, but typically rel=canonical can be implemented in the template. So, once you've got it figured out, it'll work for the entire site.
-
As far as I am aware, there is nothing wrong with using both canonicals and pagination on the same page. Google says this as well here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en
We have pagination and canonicals set up as suggested in the Google article and also have some issues with Moz saying we have duplicate content, which the pagination should "fix" as far as I understand it.
From the article:
rel="next"
andrel="prev"
are orthogonal concepts torel="canonical"
. You can include both declarations. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain: -
View source on both pages.
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000746.htm
Or use the handy Moz bar to view the descriptions
Both your title and meta are exactly the same - aka they are duplicates
view-source:http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches
<title>Workbenches & Work Stations from Key</title>view-source:http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2
<title>Workbenches & Work Stations from Key</title>You can remedy this by simply adding "- Page #" at the end of your title and description, where # is whatever page in the pagination you are at.
The reason why the other pages in your pagination are not showing up with the duplicate issue is that you are hiding them from Google.
When I am on Page 2 and I click on the buttons for page 3,4,5 etc - here are the links that are shown
Page 3 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2#productBeginIndex:60&orderBy:5&pageView:list&
Page 4 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2#productBeginIndex:90&orderBy:5&pageView:list&
Page 5 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2#productBeginIndex:120&orderBy:5&pageView:list&
These are the links that people can click on to navigate at the bottom of the page. Everything behind the hash is ignored by Google. It is a clever way to hide parameters, but when Google looks at this it is just seeing links to the exact same page. Likewise, on that page you have a canonical link to page 2, so even if Google could see the parameters you are giving it a directive that tells Google that Page 2 is the only page that exists.
I can see that you are using rel next prev to designate Page 3 as Page 3 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=3 etc, but you are not coding the rel next prev properly by putting it up in the header with the meta tags.
In summary
- You have duplicate title and meta tags for all your paginated pages
- You are not linking to your paginated pages properly within the user navigation
- You are incorrectly using rel next prev
-
Hi,
I can't explain why Moz throws a duplicate for one and not the other, that's odd. I did look at the source code for both of the paginated URLs you posted, and it looks like rel=prev/next is mostly right, but a couple suggestions:
- Remove the self-referring canonical tags - On this URL (http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets?page=2) you've got a canonical that points to itself, that's in conflict with the rel=prev/next tags. Rel=prev/next should be used in place of canonical tags, not in conjunction with.
- The one exception to my point about canonicals above: on page=1 of your pagination, canonicalize that to the root. Example, http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets?page=1 should canonicalize to http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets, since those are identical in actual displayed content.
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
-
Google Pagination Changes
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Duplicated privacy policy pages
I work for a small web agency and I noticed that many of the sites that we build have been using the same privacy policy. Obviously it can be a bit of a nightmare to write a unique privacy policy for each client so is Google likely to class this as duplicate content and result in a penalty? They must realise that privacy policies are likely to be the same or very similar as most legal writing tends to be! I can block the content in robots.txt or meta no-index it if necesarry but I just wanted to get some feedback to see if this is necessary!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamie.Stevens1 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Duplicate titles and descriptions problem?
We had an old site that used the urls for items site.com/32423432 we changed that to site.com/item name The old stuff has gone away and we have 301 redirects up. For some reason we are getting hit with duplicate titles on those pages and duplicate meta tags. The site relaunch was in November and we have a had a few problems but this just started showing up in the last week after having gone down. Any thoughts on a fix?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Brief question - SEOMOZ is teling me that i have duplicate content on the following two pages http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/ and http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/index.asp The default page for the /visas/ directory is index.asp - so it effectively the same page - but apparently SEOMOZ and more importantly Google, etc treat these as two different pages. I read about 301 redirects etc, but in this case there aren't two physical HTML pages - so how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | santiago230 -
Duplicate content
I have just read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world and I would like to know which option is the best fit for my case. I have the website http://www.hotelelgreco.gr and every image in image library http://www.hotelelgreco.gr/image-library.aspx has a different url but is considered duplicate with others of the library. Please suggest me what should i do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socrateskirtsios0 -
How often do you refresh meta descriptions? And does refreshing meta descriptions help in ranking?
1. And does refreshing meta descriptions help in ranking? 2. How often do you refresh meta descriptions? I am not sure whether it's a new feature, but I noticed this little time stamp on one of the search results, it says 1 day ago, and the website ranked quite high. So is there any correlation here? o4JIw.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0