New to Moz and wanted a bit of help with my report
-
Hi,
I have used the MOZ report to analyse one of my friends sites and I wanted to query a few warnings it highlighted and I just wanted people's thought on how important they thought these were:
The first is dupliate descriptions/titles. This is mainly down the e-commerce pages.
Fist duplicate content:
On some pages the description is identical and all that is different is the title and picture, is this an issue?Duplicate pages:
Due to the way the website folder structure/catergories has been created some pages are identical but because the product comes under 2 cetergories there is 2 seperate pages, should we use the canonical on one of the pages?Also regarding the canonical tag, they have put link rel="canonical" on every page and got it to point at itself, so not really being used in the way it is meant to be. Could something like this cause any harm?
The final thing is internal linking back to the homepage. If for example the homepage is http://www.test.com, when linking back is it best to put the full URL over "index.html" even though they are the same page?
Any help really appreciated
Dan
-
Since I don't know the exact nature of your duplicate pages, its a little hard to give a solid answer. Firstly, a canonical is a signal not a directive... so the search engines can choose to disregard it. Second, there are a few ways to consider handling duplicate page content. If your duplicate needs to exist for some reason and is a straight copy of another page or features a duplicate subset of content found on another page, then you could consider a canonical. If the duplicate page serves no real purpose and there is a better version of it elsewhere, then you could go with a 301. If the page needs to exist but could be re-written into something more relevant than its current state, do some tweaking to make it unique.
-
Great thanks. Just on this point, would it be better to use the canonicals tag to point at the other page or just slightly ammend one of the pages?
Duplicate pages:
Due to the way the website folder structure/catergories has been created some pages are identical but because the product comes under 2 cetergories there is 2 seperate pages, should we use the canonical on one of the pages? -
In reports, Canonicals are listed as a Notice not an error or a warning. Notices are just interesting facts about your site. So those aren't wrong. Many people have said that adding the canonical tag on a page pointing to itself is a good precautionary measure for if the page gets scraped.
As for http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/index.php ... They may look like the same page to you but they are not to the bots. You should choose 1 and redirect the other to it.
-
Also on point 2, in this situation would it not be best just to use a canonical tag pointing one of the pages at the other to avoid the duplicate content in Google's eyes?
-
Thanks for the reponse.
Regarding point 3:
When the website was initially made, the person making it has put this line on every page:
-
Daniel,
I like the tutorial information on the SEO Yoast web site. Their 101 section has a some great tutorials. I like their information on duplicate content: http://yoast.com/articles/duplicate-content/
Rel Canonical:http://yoast.com/wordpress/canonical/
Good luck!
Ron
-
- Yes, make sure description is different for each page
- So are there two pages in two different categories or one page being crawled twice? If it's two seperate pages in different categories I would change the title tag to something like 'Product X Category 1' and then 'Product X Category 2'. I would do the same thing with the description as well. If it's one page being crawled (possibly indexed twice) I would pick a category based on potential traffic and get rid of the 2nd category.
- Who's they? I'm not understanding this canonical question
- It should not make a difference whether you're using a full url or short url format.
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
-
The Pros & Cons of Free SEO Reports
Are the numerous Free SEO reports that are available around the internet, where I simply put a website address in and wait for the results actually any good? I tend to stick with Moz & Semrush which takes a little time pulling all the information I need together, but many of our clients are being approached by SEO's waving these free reports at them. Should I see these reports as valid, or ignore them and only concentrate on Moz. Any views will be greatly appreciated. -Christina
Moz Pro | | ChristinaRadisic1 -
What exactly is Moz Analytics?
I've taken a look at this page - http://moz.com/products/tour and I'm trying to determine if Moz Analytics is live yet? I don't think it is, just wanted to make sure. Because right now I'm just seeing all the same tools as we've always had + Fresh Web Explorer. Anyways, let me know if I'm missing something.
Moz Pro | | CAndrew14.1 -
MOZ Starter Crawl Not Working
Hello, I just added a new subdomain as one of my campaigns on MOZ. The starter crawl report keeps coming back to me with just one page crawled (it should crawl up to 250 pages). I've deleted and added this subdomain three times and it continues to present me with this problem.I've even waited a week for the full crawl report but that also showed just one page crawled. Does anybody know why this is happening? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | jampaper0 -
54 new 404 errors on my website?
Hi There In the latest report I have 54 404-errors. All last week, previously I had 2 404s that I fixed. In report say: Title404 : ErrorMeta DescriptionTraceback (most recent call last): File "build/bdist.linux- x86_64/egg/downpour/init.py", line 391, in _error failure.raiseException() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site- packages/twisted/python/failure.py", line 370, in raiseException raise self.type, self.value, self.tb Error: 404 Not FoundMeta RobotsNot present/emptyMeta RefreshNot present/empty Are these normal 404 errors I have to look at and fix? Or is this some script that running on my server and causing errors? In general - what should I do to fix this? Thanks Dean
Moz Pro | | Passanger880 -
Open Site Explorer.. Bit of a let down?
Hi, not too sure if this is a discussion or rant!? I’ve been following SEOMoz for a couple of years now. Testing their tools, reading their blogs, sharing their content, and watching the whiteboard Friday videos (massive thumbs up to that one!). They are at the top of the game, no argument there. Although I should have done so much earlier, I have eventually signed up to the pro version and am about to migrate all my clients over. But there is one major caveat which I’m not sure should exist.. Open Site Explorer. Don’t get me wrong, OSE provides invaluable metrics, some that no other ‘crawler’ provides, but it is far from perfect, there are things that we SEO’s need, and are hoping to get! Some feature SEOMoz could add; Ability to view a chart of ‘link types’ (i.e. blog post, social media, Press Release etc..) – Linkdex do this! Utilise a ‘fresh‘ backlink index as Majestic SEO do. ( we do use majestic alongside SEOMoz) Crawl more frequently – enough said! Index all ‘not so good’ backlinks – this will help identify what backlinks AREN’T helping. I realise this is a lot easier said than done, and I’m sure SEOMoz are working on solutions.. just can’t wait till they launch! What do you think? IS OSE more than it’s cracked up to be? Could it be improved? Let me know 🙂 Lee
Moz Pro | | Webpresence0 -
New to the SEO game
Hello everyone! I am fairly new to this SEO game and it all seems a little overwelming. Let me tell you a little about my experience. I have been trying for a couple years to get the ranking up on my LawnAide site and it seems at times that I keep spinning my wheels. Ive been doing blogs getting links with high ranking sites and all the other stuff. But on the local search there are still smaller companies which lower ranking sites performing better that mine. This gets very frustrating. Is there any advise out there?
Moz Pro | | lawnaide0 -
Is this an error in SEO Moz Pro Web App?
In the rankings section if I add these two terms to monitor They are both monitored: Fresh fish fresh fish Do search engines give more weight to capitals on some small scale or is this an error in the app? Thanks, Daniel.
Moz Pro | | iSenseWebSolutions0 -
All seo reports
I want to find out what all the report's correct definition and when I see improving or going down what does it mean for eg. Organic search report? Keywords? or non-paid keywords?
Moz Pro | | ITWEBTEAM0