Should I worry about duplicate content errors caused by backslashes?
-
Frequently we get red-flagged for duplicate content in the MozPro Crawl Diagnostics for URLs with and without a backslash at the end. For example:
gets flagged as being a duplicate of
I assume that we could rel=canonical this, if needed, but our assumption has been that Google is clever enough to discount this as a genuine crawl error.
Can anyone confirm or deny that?
Thanks.
-
I would 301 and not rel canoncial. Less chance of error or things getting out of hand. Also, its the correct way to canonicalise urls. The rel canonical tag is for different situations (sorting order etc)
-
Thanks - well spotted, I was a bit stupid there.
And that does look like an error to me!
-
I agree with Alex's idea, but not the particular example.
www.mysite.com/Example and www.mysite/example are two different URLs.
You can freely capitalize any letter in the domain name and it makes no difference at all and will always return the same page as per ICANN rules which all major browsers and servers follow.
@Mackenzie, I suggest setting a rule to redirect one version of your URL to the other (with or without a slash). Notice in this moz Q&A the URL does not end in a slash. If you add a slash the site will redirect the URL. What's strange to me is rather then redirecting the URL to the version of the URL without the slash the browser is redirected to the Q&A home page. My guess is that is an error or someone got lazy, but I am typing this reply in the small hope there is a valid reason I am missing and someone will educate me
-
It is considered as two different addresses, as is www.example.com and www.Example.com. You should add the canonical tag and find out how to specify your preferred version on your server too.
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
-
Yahoo Store Beginner with "duplicate content" errors. Can I pay for support? $$$
Hi. I have a Yahoo store that seems to have many errors. We built the site for utility knowing NOTHING about SEO. We just started with MOZ and would love to PAY someone to help get us past the beginning stages. Is there someone familiar with the Yahoo! Store format that can charge us perhaps in hourly blocks to walk us through possible solutions to issues? One issue we are having... seems to be that our subsections which contain items that are the endpoints... I know of no way to label the sections anything but an "item". I'm wondering if this might be causing the "duplicate" error because a specific item is listed both in the section and on it's own page. please help! Thom 888-567-5194
Moz Pro | | TITOJAX0 -
Duplicate title on Crawl
Ok, this should hopefully be a simple one. Not sure if this is a Moz crawl issue of redirect issue. Moz is reporting duplicate title for www.site.co.uk , site.co.uk and www.site.co.uk/home.aspx is this a canonical change or a moz setting I need to get this number lower.
Moz Pro | | smartcow0 -
Errors in my coding how significant is this regarding rankings ?
I posted a question on here yesterday about the homepage asking for advice regarding the content and then was told by two people were very helpful bbut moved over comment not on content but to say taht the major problem was that the coding on my website basically has too many errors which would result in me receiving lower rankings in the search engines. I realise this website is old-fashioned Dreamweaver template which was constructed several years ago which I've updated and I'm certainly not a professional, but I watch my Google analytics and there doesn't seem to be any significant change in the stats from this time last year. This is the site http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ I realise the site is old format and has been around for several years it's just from customer feedback they seem to think it looks okay for the products old cottages but I guess technically it's not the best now. I have run a test using Silktide Nibbler - a free online service that gives you a good complete overview of your website with an overall score. And it did give my website an overall good score but did point out errors in the coding but when I checked some of my competitors near the top of Google for the short tail keywords some of them also have errors in their coding, very similar to my own error score.. I then went to Google Webmaster tools and there were no warning messages. So the big question is how important are these errors scores when it appears that most of the top competition also are in the same situation? I think it's quite possible I could do with a redesign using responsive design Best Alan
Moz Pro | | WhitbyHolidayCottages0 -
18 404 errors on pages that are actually fine.
Hi, I just used the compain tool to look for errors on my site and it appears that seomoz crawler finds 18 404 errors on pages that are fine in my good. I do proceed with a URL rewritting on those pages, but navigation is fine. Some of the pages are: http://cassplumbingtampabay.com/about-us http://cassplumbingtampabay.com/commercial-services http://cassplumbingtampabay.com/drain-cleaning-repair ... Does anybody know what's going on?
Moz Pro | | acas110 -
Duplicate Page Titles & Content
We have just launched a new version of a website and after running it through SEOMOZ we have over 6000 duplicate title & content errors. (awesome) 😕 We have products that show up multiple times under different URLs however we "thought" we had implemented the rel=canonical correctly. My question is - do these errors still show up in SEOMOZ despite the canonical tags being there OR if they were "correct" would we be getting "zero" errors?
Moz Pro | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
Changing the way SEOmoz Detects Duplicate Content
Hey everyone, I wanted to highlight today's blog post in case you missed it. In short, we're using a different algorithm to detect duplicate pages. http://moz.com/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages If you see a change in your crawl results and you haven't done anything, this is probably why. Here's more information taken directly from the post: 1. Fewer duplicate page errors: a general decrease in the number of reported duplicate page errors. However, it bears pointing out that: **We may still miss some near-duplicates. **Like the current heuristic, only a subset of the near-duplicate pages is reported. **Completely identical pages will still be reported. **Two pages that are completely identical will have the same simhash value, and thus a difference of zero as measured by the simhash heuristic. So, all completely identical pages will still be reported. 2. Speed, speed, speed: The simhash heuristic detects duplicates and near-duplicates approximately 30 times faster than the legacy fingerprints code. This means that soon, no crawl will spend more than a day working its way through post-crawl processing, which will facilitate significantly faster delivery of results for large crawls.
Moz Pro | | KeriMorgret2 -
Status Errors generated from xml site map
I just ran a crawl test on our site and I'm seeing a lot of 404 errors that are referredt from the xml sitemap.. Anyone know how to fix it?
Moz Pro | | IITWebTeam0 -
Is there such thing as a site free from errors?
Or is this a given? I am new to SEO and SEOmoz. One of my campaigns is completley free of errors...the others are a work in progress. Now I realize that SEO is never done, but can a site actually be free of errors? If so... I just gave myself a pat on the back.
Moz Pro | | AtoZion0