Duplicate Page title - PHP Experts!
-
After running a crawl diagnostics i was surprised to see 336 duplicate page titles. But i am wondering if it is true or not. Most of them are not a page at all but a .php variation.
for example: The following are all the same page, but a different limit on viewing listings. Limiting your view to 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 as you choose.
.com/?lang=en&limit=5
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=10
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=15
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=25Same type of things are going on all over the site causing 228 duplicate content errors and the already mentioned 336 duplicate pages. But is "crawl diagnostic telling the truth" or is it just some php thing? I am not a php expert so any input would be much appreciated.
What should i do?
-
Both Ryan and Marie provided good answers, but let me elaborate further.
This is not a php thing. You can verify this yourself by visiting these pages.
Does the page content change when you visit /?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20 and switch to /?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20? If these look like the same page, then you have a duplicate content/title issue on your hands.
Google's take on the matter is simple...
"Provide one version of a URL to reach a document
To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this. You may also use canonical URL or use the rel="canonical" link element if you cannot redirect"
You have several options to deal with this, depending on the content_._
- Use the canonical tag to point the different versions of the page towards a single, definitive URL. Best to use this option only if the pages are actually duplicate.
- If the pages are not duplicate in content, but duplicate in title, then make sure your CMS writes unique title tags for every unique page of content, as Marie describes.
- If these extra pages are producing lists of only slightly varying entries, like a list of blog archives, you may consider adding a Meta Robots tag to NOINDEX, FOLLOW those superfluous pages.
- If dealing with pagination, here's an excellent article from Adam Audette to help.
This is a tricky area, and you must be careful when dealing with duplicate content, because it's easy to make a mistake and have Google de-index your content. That said, by correcting these errors, you just might see an improvement in your indexation and traffic stats.
-
I'm not sure if this will answer your question or just confuse things, but here's my take on the situation.
Are the pages all duplicate content, or are the titles just duplicated? If this is all the exact same page but simply with a different url then the solution is to use a rel canonical tag. (See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394). This tells Google what the original version of the page is and to not index the other pages.
However, if these are all different pages and you are trying to create a unique title for each then there are some ways to do this. Like Ryan mentioned, if you're using a CMS (i.e. Wordpress) there's likely a plugin that will do this for you. But, if you have a static site then here is what I do. I have a static site and I have a page called, let's say, www.example.com/information?id=123. I have thousands of these pages but they all have different content. The content is generated from a database.
So, what I do is I put php in the head of the page, before the title. The php reads the database and grabs some information about the page and stores that information in a variable called $title. Then, in the title tag I do this:
<title><?php echo $title; ?></title>
Hopefully that makes sense!
-
Let me preface by saying I am not a PHP expert. I do have some familiarity with PHP and the issue you mention.
The bottom line, you do not wish to use the same title for multiple URLs. Using the URLs you shared, some possible titles would be:
Best Restaurants in Miami
Best Restaurants in Miami - Page 3
Best Restaurants in Miami - Page 4
You need to adjust your site code to add a page number to the existing URLs. Most popular software is set up to do this automatically.
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
-
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I just had my site crawled by the seomoz robot and it came back with some errors. Basically it seems the categories and dates are not crawling directly. I'm a SEO newbie here Below is a capture of the video of what I am talking about. Any ideas on how to fix this? Hkpekchp
Technical SEO | | mcardenal0 -
Duplicate Page Content for sorted archives?
Experienced backend dev, but SEO newbie here 🙂 When SEOmoz crawls my site, I get notified of DPC errors on some list/archive sorted pages (appending ?sort=X to the url). The pages all have rel=canonical to the archive home. Some of the pages are shorter (have only one or two entries). Is there a way to resolve this error? Perhaps add rel=nofollow to the sorting menu? Or perhaps find a method that utilizes a non-link navigation method to sort / switch sorted pages? No issues with duplicate content are showing up on google webmaster tools. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | jwondrusch0 -
Duplicate Title Tags and Meta Desc even with the correct Canonical Tag
I show a large/growing number of duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions in my webmaster tools. I look at both pages Link 1 - http://www.thatsmytopper.com/wedding-cake-toppers/theme-cake-toppers/beach-theme-cake-toppers/where/color/petal-pink.html Link 2 - http://www.thatsmytopper.com/wedding-cake-toppers/theme-cake-toppers/beach-theme-cake-toppers/where/color/petal-pink/limit/16.html Both pages have the following canonical url: <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.thatsmytopper.com/wedding-cake-toppers/theme-cake-toppers/beach-theme-cake-toppers.html" > Why does this show up as a duplicate title tag and description to Google still?
Technical SEO | | bhalverson0 -
Duplicate Page Content / Rel Canonical
Hi, The diagnostics shows me that I have 590 Duplicate Page Content , but when it shows the Rel Canonical I have over 1000, so dose that mean I have no Duplicate Page Content problem? Please help.
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles
A few weeks ago my error count went up for Duplicate Page Content and Titles. 4 errors in all. A week later the errors were gone... But now they are back. I made changes to the Webconfig over a month ago but nothing since. SEOmoz is telling me the duplicate content is this http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ and http://www.antiquebanknotes.com Thanks for any advise! This is the relevant web.config. <rewrite><rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.antiquebanknotes.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
<action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" www.antiquebanknotes.com="" {r:1"="">http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/{R:1}" />
</action></match></rule>
<rule name="Default Page" enabled="true" stopprocessing="true"><match url="^default.aspx$"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll"><add input="{REQUEST_METHOD}" pattern="GET"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="/"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite>0 -
Are all duplicate pages bad?
I just got my first Crawl Report for my forum and it said I have almost 9,000 duplicate pages. When I looked at a sample of them though I saw that many of them were "reply" links. By this I mean the "reply" button was clicked for a topic yet since the crawler was not a member, it just brought them to the login/register screen. Since all the topics would bring you to the same login page I'm assuming it counted all these "reply" links as duplicates. Should I just ignore these or is there some way to fix it? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Xee0 -
Duplicate title issue
During the crwal SEO moz found duplicate title problems with quite a good number of pages. This was because my site has test questions like http://www.skill-guru.com/12/scjp-5-mock-test/questions and when user does next or previous, they can traverse to different pages but the title and descrition would remain same. How can this probkem be resolved ?
Technical SEO | | skill-guru2