It's because the search engines actually treat every parameter based version of your URL as a separate page, so it really does look like duplicate content to the search engine. So Moz is crawling them in the same way. This is informative for you. In your case, you have canonical tags back to the version with the query string, which would be the fix for you anyway.
Posts made by Kenn_Gold
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RE: HOW DOES MOZ FILTER ISSUES ON WEBSITES?
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RE: Is it still true that when your video is shown in a Google Video Carousel your page is not shown in the normal SERPS?
I just was able to search on a video that we have on YouTube and also is highly featured on a specific page on www.
Searching the video title shows the video in the carousel at the top from YouTube, and a native link to my www site where the video is featured at the top of the SERP.
Hope that helps.
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RE: SEO - New URL structure
One additional thought to add extra complexity, adding hierarchy is fine, but try to avoid increasing page depth while doing so.
John Mueller discussed this in a few places in the past year that page depth > URL structure.
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RE: Same subcategory in different main categories
You are correct - if you are ending up with duplicate content because you are generating URLs (and probably breadcrumbs) based on the navigational path someone is following, canonicals are your best answer.
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RE: What is the best tool for getting a SiteMap url for a website with over 4k pages?
We use Screaming Frog and we are about 80k pages.
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RE: Bit.ly Links & Google
Do you mean for the referrer in GA? If so, than the referrer will be the original source URL, not the Bit.ly URL. Also for the source, so if you use Bit.ly from Twitter back to your site, in GA the traffic will show under social in the acquisition section.
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RE: On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
You have some great responses so far, and I wanted to add one additional thought. Header tags are really important for screen readers. When in doubt about the best way to use page elements, I tend to think to myself about what would be the best case for Accessibility. The answer is usually one of your top options for search optimization also.
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RE: Migration Challenge Question
Thanks Andy - I am so accustomed to thinking in permanent changes and in 301s and rel=canonical, that the obvious 302 skipped my thinking. While I am unsure if they will be willing to 302 in this interim period, it certainly will be my primary recommendation now.
Thanks for reading though that, it was actually a challenge to try to detail out.
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Migration Challenge Question
I work for a company that recently acquired another company and we are in the process of merging the brands.
Right now we have two website, lets call them:
We are working with a web development company who is designing our brand new site, which will launch at the end of September, we can call that www.parentacquired.com.
Normally it would be simple enough to just 301 redirect all content from www.parentcompanyalpha.com and www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com to the mapped migrated content on www.parentacquired.com.
But that would be too simple. The reality is that only 30% of www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com will be migrating over, as part of that acquired business is remaining independent of the merged brands, and might be sold off.
So someone over there mirrored the www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com site and created an exact duplicate of www.acquiredcompanybravo.com.
So now we have duplicate content for that site out there (I was unaware they were doing this now, we thought they were waiting until our new site was launched).
Eventually we will want some of the content from acquiredcompanyalpha.com to redirect to acquiredcompanybravo.com and the remainder to parentacquired.com.
What is the best interim solution to maintain as much of the domain values as possible? The new site won't launch until end of September, and it could fall into October. I have two sites that are mirrors of each other, one with a domain value of 67 and the new one a lowly 17. I am concerned about the duplicate site dragging down that 67 score.
I can ask them to use rel=canonical tags temporarily if both sites are going to remain until Sept/Oct timeframe, but which way should they go? I am inclined to think the best result would be to have acquiredcompanybravo.com rel=canonical back to acquiredcompanyalpha.com for now, and when the new site launches, remove those and redirect as appropriate. But will that have long term negative impact on acquiredcomapnybravo.com?
Sorry, if this is convoluted, it is a little crazy with people in different companies doing different things that are not coordinated.
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RE: 2 websites, 1 business... How should I proceed?
To add to what Miriam said, as I am in the process of handling a merger for a client right now and am dealing with this same issue.
In my client's case, they are building a new website that represents the merged company, migrating the content from both sites into one (in many cases content on both sites is redundant so we eliminate/consolidate some) and then we will use 301 redirects mapped from the old site content to the new site content.
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RE: How can I tell if a site is trustworthy and is not / hasn't been penalized by Google?
I usually just use the Moz Rank score here using Open Site Explorer. http://moz.com/learn/seo/mozrank
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RE: Does Social Media hold value with SEO? If so then how?
A couple answers are applicable here, because the bucket "social" might be a little broad to answer this.
For G+: Engagement (shares, +1s, etc) does affect rankings for those people who have your G+ page and search relevant content to what you are posting on your G+ page, if they are logged in and getting personalized results. Additionally, if you are logged in and getting personalized results, your network (pages you have in a circle) on G+ who have liked, shared, engaged with content also seems to rank higher on your SERP.
Additionally, there is a strong correlation between high engagement on FB and Twitter posts (comments, likes, shares RTs) and ranking....but there is no definitive causal link that I am aware of. If you create good content that does well in social media, it is probably being linked in other places, and therefore will rank well.
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RE: Examples of B2B websites offering services (not products)
I was killing time looking at some old posts and came across yours. I just Googled 'construction human resources' and found this site: http://www.clp.com/Construction-Human-Resources
They seem to do a decent job of SEO. Although I did not audit the page, I just spot checked a bunch of those sections from the sidebar and they were first page for many of them.
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RE: Temporary Duplicate Sites - Do anything?
Thanks for the response.
It might have been just an unfounded concern, based on a vague memory of something I read about rel=canonical on here, but cannot find it now.
I was just concerned that if you have site A and B and rel=canonical from B to A, then eventually get rid of A and have B take on the URL of A, that the engines might interpret this oddly and have it affect domain authority.
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Temporary Duplicate Sites - Do anything?
Hi Mozzers -
We are about to move one of our sites to Joomla. This is one of our main sites and it receives about 40 million visits a month, so the dev team is a little concerned about how the new site will handle the load.
Dev's solution, since we control about 2/3 of that traffic through our own internal email and cross promotions, is to launch the new site and not take down the old site. They would leave the old site on its current URL and make the new site something like new.sub.site.com. Traffic we control would continue to the old site, traffic that we detect as new would be re-directed to the new site. Over time (the think about 3-4 months) they would shift the traffic all to the new site, then eventually change the URL of the new site to be the URL of the old site and be done.
So this seems to be at the outset a duplicate content (whole site) issue to start with. I think the best course of action is try to preserve all SEO value on the old URL since the new URL will eventually go away and become the old URL. I could consider on the new site no-crawl/no-index tags temporarily while both sites exist, but would that be risky since that site will eventually need to take those tags off and become the only site? Rel=canonical temporarily from the new site to the old site also seems like it might not be the best answer.
Any thoughts?
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RE: Our "home page" is behind a member wall, options?
And in this case, "can't" is not only dev code, but marketing code also. They are so afraid of change here...but I get that, we are successful too.
And just my saying "hey, we have the worst case scenario for SEO right now" is not always enough...they want more opinions. Which is why this Q&A feature of SEOMoz is awesome! Thanks again for your thoughtful responses.
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RE: Our "home page" is behind a member wall, options?
Yes, it IS a giant ad The CTR for that "Begin" button is so incredibly high though, that it would shock you. I have been doing landing page optimization for conversion for years, and I am surprised at how high the CTR is for that.
I am not actually sure why we are not serving the home up dynamically, I have suggested it, along with some of the other suggestions I posted above. Most likely it is related to our very complicated proprietary CMS (actually two of them).
Thanks for the response!
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RE: Should I use always the highest bid?
It really depends on whether you are looking for a higher CTR or a lower CPA. This will vary depending on what your goal is. If you are just trying to drive any and all traffic, then generally higher bids and first position will almost always result in more raw traffic.
If you are driving to a landing page though, and your goal is to get qualified traffic to not only click on the add but convert through some sort of call to action, often a lower average ad position can pay off quite well for you. Especially if there are a lot of ads and you have 3 ads on top of the organic listing and several more on the right side of the SERP. In those cases, I often find a lot of success in qualified clicks with an average position of 4.5.
Of course it does depend on your vertical, and B2B and B2C often act very differently.
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RE: Our "home page" is behind a member wall, options?
Of course it is not a 301 redirect, it is not a perm redirect as it is a conditional redirect only, based on your status of being logged in or not.
I do see that I switched back and forth between our internal language for these pages and will try to clarify.
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Our "home page" is behind a member wall, options?
So www.pch.com(portal) redirects to www.pch.com/unrecognized(landing page) if you are not registered with us and logged in. This means that the search engines are not logged in, so they see only our landing page.
It used to be that there was no portal/home, on pch.com, that was just the landing page, but that changed about 6 months ago. We do rank for our brand terms, but my company would like to rank for terms like "sweepstakes." They DO understand why we don't, thankfully. They don't think SEO is magic voodoo. They get it. But they asked for options, as I have said that the portal on www.pch.com really is a good page to optimize for non-brand, core terms like sweepstakes....but only if the search engines can see it.
I gave them these options, and they asked me to seek out more. So any thoughts would be good:
1. Best case scenario would be to abandon the landing page, just have the keyword rich portal page be the actual home page with no re-direct. (this won't happen, but I decided it needed to be first on my list).
2. Turn the portal into the home page (remove the redirect), but have the landing page overlay in a light box. This should, if I am not mistaken, be a best of both worlds situation, where the light box landing page would still have all of the value of the actual keyword rich portal page behind it.
3. If the landing page has to remain as it does now with the non-logged in redirect to it, change the URLs so that the landing page is www.pch.com and the portal becomes www.pch.com/members/ or something like that.
Any other thoughts? Thanks!
Kenn Gold
Publishers Clearing House
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RE: Best way to preserve site authority / juice when moving a property to Facebook?
Totally valid question.
In this case, it's a matter of the content chasing the users and accepting that for the type of content I'm offering, the average user would likely prefer to stay inside of FB. But, as you point out, it's absolutely a non-zero risk, and domain juice is where I'm starting the risk-assessment process :).
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Best way to preserve site authority / juice when moving a property to Facebook?
Hi, so, I have a website. Let's call it a cooking website with about 300 pieces of content cross-listed among 20 categories.
I want to move my entire site, hook line and sinker, to Facebook. My first thought was to do this with a domain-wide 301, as that would preserve most of the authority and juice my site has built over the years... but would this have a corollary effect of unfocusing my keyword strategy? E.g. is there a risk in doing a sitewide 301 to a single landing page, in that some of the juice I'd be passing to my new home page would be from, say, "recipes for jelly donuts?"
Has anyone had an experience making a large product transition like this, and are there any current best practices?
Thanks!