Duplicate content and canonicalization confusion
-
Hello,
http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR pages have same content and their canonical refers to the page itself. Yet, they rank in search engines. Is it because they have been targeted to different geographical locations? If so, still the content is same.
Please help me clear this confusion.
Regards
-
I agree with you. It's all very confusing and little details make a BIG difference. Thanks for sticking with this.
-
Thanks a ton Donna for looking into the issue and helping at this level. I highly appreciate it
Their canonical tags confused me. As you have mentioned, the tags should have been one, I don't know why they are using two different ones. Probably, they have set the different geographic targets in Google Webmaster Tools and with the minor content variation and canonical tags, they want to signal Google to treat both the pages differently. I mean it's a big name in the world of ERP. They can't mess up with the canonical tags.
What do you think?
-
Okay. Let's start over looking at it from a goal perspective. I compared the two pages. Here is the difference between the two in terms of page text, highlighted in yellow - http://63.249.66.211/comparison.html. The differences are in the URL, the phone numbers at the top, a word here and there in the middle, and the 2nd block of text and photo under "Explore Our Solutions".
The first page, which I'll call India, has a canoncial tag pointing to itself. (http://www.sap.com/india/pc/bp/erp.html"/>) .
The second page, which I'll call UK, has a canoncial tag, also pointing to itself. (http://www.sap.com/uk/pc/bp/erp.html"/>).
- If you want both pages to rank and have authority, then you use the canonical tag. You need to use the same canonical tag on both pages. Right now they're different. That will essentially tell Google to treat the two pages as one; to show one or the other in search results, but considate their combined SEO value into one for ranking purposes.
- If you only want one page to rank, then noindex the other.
Does that make more sense?
-
Thanks for the reply Donna but my question is bit different. Could you please take a look at the rel canonical tag of the urls I posted. The content on both the pages is 100% same. The only difference is that they are targeted at different geographic locations. The canonical tags point to the page itself and not any master page.
-
This might help Shailendra - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en. Skim down to (or search for) the part beginning with "This indicates the preferred URL", about half-way down the page.
Bottom line, Google attempts to respect canonical tags but it's no guarantee. Increase your chances by using "absolute paths rather than relative paths with the
rel="canonical"
link element". -
Thanks everyone for the response! But I am still confused. The two links that I have posted in my initial question have exactly the same content on both the pages (targeted at different geographic locations) and their canonical tags do not refer to any master page but to them itself, i.e. canonical tag on page A refers to A and canonical tag on page B refers to B. Please take a look at both the pages: http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR
Regards
-
Canonical pages still get indexed at Google's discretion.
A related question was asked in March 2013 that I think, explains what you're seeing. I've cut and pasted the relevant part below. Mememax is the author.
"Normally the only thing which will prevent a page from ranking is noindex tag. If you don't want to have it indexed just noindex it, if that page has been laready indexed, put the noindex tag and delete from index using GWT option.
Concerning the canonical tag thing, it will consolidate the seo value in one page but it won't prevent those page to appear in rankings, however you may have two cases:
-
the two or more pages are identical. In that case google may accept the canonicalization and show always the original page.
-
the two or more pages are slightly different, it's the case of paginated pages which are canonicalized using rel next/prev. In that sense the whole value will be consolidated in page 1 but then the page which will be shown in the rankings will be the one which responds to that query, for example if someone is looking for blue glass, google will return the page which shows blue glass listing if that's different from the first one."
-
-
Yes, if they were directly competing against each other, you'd expect one of them to drop out of the rankings. What are they both ranking for?
If they are both showing up in the same search, my guess would be that they are very new and Google hasn't noticed the duplication.
But if you see the ranking in different searches (like Google UK and Google India), then you are probably right, Google does not see them as duplicate since they are being shown to different audiences.
-
Hi,
I am sharing two Matt cutts video on this to clear your confusion.I hope it helps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw
Thanks
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
-
Duplicate content w/ same URLs
I am getting high priority issues for our privacy & terms pages that have the same URL. Why would this show up as duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RanvirGujral0 -
Duplicate Content Issue WWW and Non WWW
One of my sites got hit with duplicate content a while ago because Google seemed to be considering hhtp, https, www, and non ww versions of the site all different sites. We thought we fixed it, but for some reason https://www and just https:// are giving us duplicate content again. I can't seem to figure out why it keeps doing this. The url is https://bandsonabudget.com if any of you want to see if you can figure out why I am still having this issue.
Technical SEO | | Michael4g1 -
Duplicate Content Issues - Where to start???
Dear All I have recently joined a new company Just Go Holidays - www.justgoholidays.com I have used the SEO Moz tools (yesterday) to review the site and see that I have lots of duplicate content/pages and also lots of duplicate titles all of which I am looking to deal with. Lots of the duplicate pages appear to be surrounding, additional parameters that are used on our site to refine and or track various marketing campaigns. I have therefore been into Google Webmaster Tools and defined each of these parameters. I have also built a new XML sitemap and submitted that too. It looks as is we have two versions of the site, one being at www.justgoholidays.com and the other without the www It appears that there are no redirects from the latter to the former, do I need to use 301's here or is it ok to use canonicalisation instead? Any thoughts on an action plan to try to address these issues in the right order and the right way would be very gratefully received as I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. (we also use a CMS system that is not particularly friendly and I think I will have to go directly to the developers to make lots of the required changes which is sure to cost - therefore really don't want to get this wrong) All the best Matt
Technical SEO | | MattByrne0 -
Duplicate Content Due to Pagination
Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss. While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful... Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages. I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform. Thank you for taking the time to read my question!
Technical SEO | | josh3300 -
How to prevent duplicate content at a calendar page
Hi, I've a calender page which changes every day. The main url is
Technical SEO | | GeorgFranz
/calendar For every day, there is another url: /calendar/2012/09/12
/calendar/2012/09/13
/calendar/2012/09/14 So, if the 13th september arrives, the content of the page
/calendar/2012/09/13
will be shown at
/calendar So, it's duplicate content. What to do in this situation? a) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 301? (but the redirect changes the day after to /calendar/2012/09/14) b) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 302 (but I will loose the link juice of /calendar?) c) Add a canonical tag at /calendar (which leads to /calendar/2012/09/13) - but I will loose the power of /calendar (?) - and it will change every day... Any ideas or other suggestions? Best wishes, Georg.0 -
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 -
Thin/Duplicate Content
Hi Guys, So here's the deal, my team and I just acquired a new site using some questionable tactics. Only about 5% of the entire site is actually written by humans the rest of the 40k + (and is increasing by 1-2k auto gen pages a day)pages are all autogen + thin content. I'm trying to convince the powers that be that we cannot continue to do this. Now i'm aware of the issue but my question is what is the best way to deal with this. Should I noindex these pages at the directory level? Should I 301 them to the most relevant section where actual valuable content exists. So far it doesn't seem like Google has caught on to this yet and I want to fix the issue while not raising any more red flags in the process. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DPASeo0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello All, my first web crawl has come back with a duplicate content warning for www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm slightly mystified! thanks paul
Technical SEO | | simodal0