Duplicate title tags being caused by upper case and lower case version of urls'
-
Hi
GWT is reporting lots of duplicate titles for a clients new site.
Mainly these are due to 2x different versions of the url, one with words starting with an upper case character and the other all lower case.
Clients dev saying this has something to do with windows server and is ok!
Is this correct or should i be telling them to delete and then 301 redirect all upper case versions to the lower case (since lower case better practice) and that will deal with the reported dupe titles ?
All Best
Dan
-
Hi Tom
Sorry to be a pain but please can you confirm re my latest question/comment reply to yours, i.e. does your advice still stand if client on a windows server (since i dont think have .htaccess files or do/can they?)
And if not then is there a similar course of action that can be taken ?
Cheers
Dan
-
Many Thanks Raymond !
All Best
Dan
-
That great Tom thanks alot for your advice !
Clients on a windows server, am i right in thinking they dont have htaccess files since they are just on apache ?
If so is principle/code the same and just done in a different file ? if so any ideas what that file is ? or am i mistaken and windows do have htaccess files ?
Cheers
Dan
-
Hi Dan
I wouldn't want to leave anything to doubt and would prefer to have 1 version of each URL available.
Fortunately, a fairly simple solution can be put in place in your htaccess file. As always, please backup and test before trying any implementation - I can't tell you how many times I've made a simple mistake in the htaccess file that causes big problems!
Anyway, the code you'd want to enter at the top of the file is:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]That code will basically rewrite any URL containing uppercase letters to the same URL using only lowercase.
Redirects are quicker and more reliable than canonical tags in my experience and this doesn't take long to get implemented, so best not leave anything to chance.
Hope this helps.
-
GWT sometimes takes a while to register the change. It just actually happened on one of my clients pages where there was a bug in the code made by the developer and they got 30,000 duplicate title and description errors. It was fixed about 2 months ago and while the errors have dropped to 2000 or so, it is still not at zero yet, so it does take some time depending on how often Google crawls the site.
If the developer says they did it, I would recommend the first thing you do is simply check that they did it. Go to one of the pages in question, both one with capital and without, and do a view source on both to check that the rel="canonical" tag is there and is correct. Programmers don't always know much about SEO so they may be implementing them wrong.
-
Thanks Raymond
The developers are saying they have done this
Does that mean that if its showing in GWT it hasnt been done ?
Cheers
Dan
-
As a simpler solution, why don't you just add a rel="canonical" tag to each page specifying the one you want? That should take care of any duplicate content issues.
I hope this helps.
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 didn't show my correct language-version homepage.
I have a website which serves two languages - English and Chinese. My English homepage can be indexed by Google. But when I search the brand term in English, Google returns my Chinese homepage. I already added the hreflang attributes. And I'm working on building the XML sitemap for three languages. What other things I can work on to fix the issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jsteimle0 -
Duplicate Page Title Crawl Error Issue
In the last crawl for on of our client websites the duplicate page title and page content numbers were very high. They are reading every page twice. http://www.barefootparadisevacations.com and http://barefootparadisevacations.com are being read as two different pages with the same page title. After the last crawl I used our built in redirect tool to redirect the urls, but the most recent crawl showed the same issue. Is this issue really hurting our rankings and if so, any suggestions on a fix for the problem? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | LoveMyPugs0 -
Duplicate Title Tags
Hi, Are these 2 title tags different enough? Notice only the 's' on Templates is switched <colgroup><col width="559"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Studio33
| Invoice Templates | Invoice Template | invoicing Software | Invoice Software Invoice Template | Invoice Templates | invoicing Software | Invoice Software | Thanks0 -
OSE says URL redirects to URL with trailing slash but it doesn't.
Site is www.example.com/folder/us and OSE says this URL redirects to www.example.com/folder/us/, but it does not. When I look at the OSE report for the latter version with the "/" it says "No Data Available For This URL". Why would that be? The original URL is www.example.com and it redirects to www.example.com/folder/us. Is this anything I need to worry about? I thought that the trailing / doesn't really mean much anymore but nonetheless, why does it think it redirects there?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Yoast WP SEO Plugin: Duplicate Title / Description For Pagination
Hello, I just have installed on YAOST WP SEO plugin on my blog to optimize and get better results, as I was using All in one seo Plugin before. On Tuesday SEOMOZ crawler has been updated my site report and I found several errors with my site related to duplicate meta title / description. Home Page Pagination, Categories/archive pagination and tags pagination bring the same meta title and description. I tried several methods to get the required result but unfortunately nothing helped. I used %%pagenumber%% and %%page%% etc. Any help will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Google is keeping very old title tags in the SERPs for my site. How can I fix this?
Hi Around 6 months ago a site I work with changed its brand. One company became two. Despite changing the title when a new site went live around 6 months ago Google still picks up the old title for certain search results relevant to the old title. When a search result is relevant to the new title it shows that. It's very frustrating as we are trying to re-brand and do not want the old brand name showing for some very important search results. Thanks in advance for your help Paul
Technical SEO | | pauldoffman0 -
Omniture tracking code URLs creating duplicate content
My ecommerce company uses Omniture tracking codes for a variety of different tracking parameters, from promotional emails to third party comparison shopping engines. All of these tracking codes create URLs that look like www.domain.com/?s_cid=(tracking parameter), which are identical to the original page and these dynamic tracking pages are being indexed. The cached version is still the original page. For now, the duplicate versions do not appear to be affecting rankings, but as we ramp up with holiday sales, promotions, adding more CSEs, etc, there will be more and more tracking URLs that could potentially hurt us. What is the best solution for this problem? If we use robots.txt to block the ?s_cid versions, it may affect our listings on CSEs, as the bots will try to crawl the link to find product info/pricing but will be denied. Is this correct? Or, do CSEs generally use other methods for gathering and verifying product information? So far the most comprehensive solution I can think of would be to add a rel=canonical tag to every unique static URL on our site, which should solve the duplicate content issues, but we have thousands of pages and this would take an eternity (unless someone knows a good way to do this automagically, I’m not a programmer so maybe there’s a way that I don’t know). Any help/advice/suggestions will be appreciated. If you have any solutions, please explain why your solution would work to help me understand on a deeper level in case something like this comes up again in the future. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianCC0 -
Should I use a "-", ":", or "|" in the title tag?
Out of habit, I've always put a "-" or dash to separate items in the title tag. However, I've noticed that more and more sites are using either a ":" or "|" in the title. Is there one that is better to use than the other?
Technical SEO | | beeneeb0