Pagination & duplicate meta
-
Hi
I have a few pages flagged for duplicate meta e.g.:
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenchesI can;t see anything wrong with the pagination & other pages have the same code, but aren't flagged for duplicate:
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets?page=2
I can't see to find the issue - any ideas?
Becky
-
Regarding the links which point to pages, but include the hash. If Google is only seeing this page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches
Will it be seeing these as pages which have duplicate content?
-
No problem thank you
-
I could write out how to implements rel next prev but it would be better to look at these articles
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/ugc/seo-guide-to-google-webmaster-recommendations-for-pagination
-
Hi,
Yes there is javascript to sort the results on those pages.
Is the solution to have these URLs page=2 etc, correctly linked from the page number?
Then ensure rel/prev are used correctly?
I'm also concerned about the content we have at the bottom of the products being shown as duplicate.
-
Hi
Thank you for this. One thing I am confused about is, if Google doesn't crawl those paginated pages, why will it pick up the meta as duplicate?
Thank you for highlighting the links - I hadn't noticed this before.
Where should the rel next prev be coded?
Thanks for your feedback
-
I get how hashes work.
Crawlers do see the page=2, page=3, etc. URLs because the right/left navigation buttons to the side of the numbers link to them. I just proved this by crawling the site in Screaming Frog and doing a search for page=, they're all found.
Becky, there's something larger at play here, potentially with your CMS configuration. It looks like the navigation for paginated sections is messed up. Mouse-over the links and look at the URL in the lower left of your browser, and then click the link and look at your URL bar. The results are very different from what you see on mouse-over. I'd recommend your first step is to talk to your developers and see if they can fix this issue. As VivaCa mentioned, you could be getting false alarms on duplicates here from Moz, so you might be clear with the canonical and prev/next fix - Screaming Frog finds all of those tags properly.
-
I think you guys are missing the point. Anything after the hashtag is ignored. As far as the crawler is concerned, all the links to page 2,3,4,5 are all the same URL - that is why the crawler does not see the other pages.
There is no issue with canonical or how it interacts with the rel next prev. My point on the canonical was simply for illustrative purposes and looks to be implemented correctly.
Separate from the canonical the rel next prevs are setup incorrectly and that needs to be fixed once the issue with how the paginated pages are linked to using the URL with the hashtag parameters.
-
We have the exact same issue, and I found this reply from Dr. Pete helpful regarding this (assuming that what he says is still true): https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/pagination-issues-on-e-commerce-site-duplicate-page-title-and-content-on-moz-crawl
His reply:
Unfortunately, Moz Analytics/PRO don't process rel=prev/next properly at this time, so we may give false alarms on those pages, even if the tags are properly implemented.
It can be tricky, but Google recommends a combination of rel=canonical and rel=prev/next. Use the canonical tag to keep sorts from getting indexed, and then use rel=prev/next for the pagination itself. Your 3rd example (page=2...) should rel=prev/next to the URLs before and after it but then canonical to the page=2 variation with no sort parameter. It can get complicated fast, unfortunately, but typically rel=canonical can be implemented in the template. So, once you've got it figured out, it'll work for the entire site.
-
As far as I am aware, there is nothing wrong with using both canonicals and pagination on the same page. Google says this as well here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en
We have pagination and canonicals set up as suggested in the Google article and also have some issues with Moz saying we have duplicate content, which the pagination should "fix" as far as I understand it.
From the article:
rel="next"
andrel="prev"
are orthogonal concepts torel="canonical"
. You can include both declarations. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain: -
View source on both pages.
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000746.htm
Or use the handy Moz bar to view the descriptions
Both your title and meta are exactly the same - aka they are duplicates
view-source:http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches
<title>Workbenches & Work Stations from Key</title>view-source:http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2
<title>Workbenches & Work Stations from Key</title>You can remedy this by simply adding "- Page #" at the end of your title and description, where # is whatever page in the pagination you are at.
The reason why the other pages in your pagination are not showing up with the duplicate issue is that you are hiding them from Google.
When I am on Page 2 and I click on the buttons for page 3,4,5 etc - here are the links that are shown
Page 3 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2#productBeginIndex:60&orderBy:5&pageView:list&
Page 4 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2#productBeginIndex:90&orderBy:5&pageView:list&
Page 5 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2#productBeginIndex:120&orderBy:5&pageView:list&
These are the links that people can click on to navigate at the bottom of the page. Everything behind the hash is ignored by Google. It is a clever way to hide parameters, but when Google looks at this it is just seeing links to the exact same page. Likewise, on that page you have a canonical link to page 2, so even if Google could see the parameters you are giving it a directive that tells Google that Page 2 is the only page that exists.
I can see that you are using rel next prev to designate Page 3 as Page 3 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=3 etc, but you are not coding the rel next prev properly by putting it up in the header with the meta tags.
In summary
- You have duplicate title and meta tags for all your paginated pages
- You are not linking to your paginated pages properly within the user navigation
- You are incorrectly using rel next prev
-
Hi,
I can't explain why Moz throws a duplicate for one and not the other, that's odd. I did look at the source code for both of the paginated URLs you posted, and it looks like rel=prev/next is mostly right, but a couple suggestions:
- Remove the self-referring canonical tags - On this URL (http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets?page=2) you've got a canonical that points to itself, that's in conflict with the rel=prev/next tags. Rel=prev/next should be used in place of canonical tags, not in conjunction with.
- The one exception to my point about canonicals above: on page=1 of your pagination, canonicalize that to the root. Example, http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets?page=1 should canonicalize to http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets, since those are identical in actual displayed content.
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
-
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Noindex Valuable duplicate content?
How could duplicate content be valuable and why question no indexing it? My new client has a clever african safari route builder that you can use to plan your safari. The result is 100's of pages that have different routes. Each page inevitably has overlapping content / destination descriptions. see link examples. To the point - I think it is foolish to noindex something like this. But is Google's algo sophisticated enough to not get triggered by something like this? http://isafari.nathab.com/routes/ultimate-tanzania-kenya-uganda-safari-july-november
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman
http://isafari.nathab.com/routes/ultimate-tanzania-kenya-uganda-safari-december-june0 -
HELP! How does one prevent regional pages as being counted as "duplicate content," "duplicate meta descriptions," et cetera...?
The organization I am working with has multiple versions of its website geared towards the different regions. US - http://www.orionhealth.com/ CA - http://www.orionhealth.com/ca/ DE - http://www.orionhealth.com/de/ UK - http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/ AU - http://www.orionhealth.com/au/ NZ - http://www.orionhealth.com/nz/ Some of these sites have very similar pages which are registering as duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles. Two examples are: http://www.orionhealth.com/terms-and-conditions http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/terms-and-conditions Now even though the content is the same, the navigation is different since each region has different product options / services, so a redirect won't work since the navigation on the main US site is different from the navigation for the UK site. A rel=canonical seems like a viable option, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it tells search engines to only index the main page, in this case, it would be the US version, but I still want the UK site to appear to search engines. So what is the proper way of treating similar pages accross different regional directories? Any insight would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
How do I geo-target continents & avoid duplicate content?
Hi everyone, We have a website which will have content tailored for a few locations: USA: www.site.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
Europe EN: www.site.com/eu
Canada FR: www.site.com/fr-ca Link hreflang and the GWT option are designed for countries. I expect a fair amount of duplicate content; the only differences will be in product selection and prices. What are my options to tell Google that it should serve www.site.com/eu in Europe instead of www.site.com? We are not targeting a particular country on that continent. Thanks!0 -
Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow
Hi all, I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions 🙂 We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS! Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination). After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
"There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt" So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt. So coming to my question. Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index? Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index? I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
"Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”. I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index. Thanks! B0 -
Is this duplicate content something to be concerned about?
On the 20th February a site I work on took a nose-dive for the main terms I target. Unfortunately I can't provide the url for this site. All links have been developed organically so I have ruled this out as something which could've had an impact. During the past 4 months I've cleaned up all WMT errors and applied appropriate redirects wherever applicable. During this process I noticed that mydomainname.net contained identical content to the main mydomainname.com site. Upon discovering this problem I 301 redirected all .net content to the main .com site. Nothing has changed in terms of rankings since doing this about 3 months ago. I also found paragraphs of duplicate content on other sites (competitors in different countries). Although entire pages haven't been copied there is still enough content to highlight similarities. As this content was written from scratch and Google would've seen this within it's crawl and index process I wanted to get peoples thoughts as to whether this is something I should be concerned about? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bfrl0 -
Mobile version creating duplicate content
Hi We have a mobile site which is a subfolder within our site. Therefore our desktop site is www.mysite.com and the mobile version is www.mysite.com/m/. All URL's for specific pages are the same with the exception of /m/ in them for the mobile version. The mobile version has the specific user agent detection capabilities. I never saw this as being duplicate content initially as I did some research and found the following links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterkn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k
http://searchengineland.com/dont-penalize-yourself-mobile-sites-are-not-duplicate-content-40380
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022109.html What I am finding now is that when I look into Google Webmaster Tools, Google shows that there are 2 pages with the same Page title and therefore Im concerned if Google sees this as duplicate content. The reason why the page title and meta description is the same is simply because the content on the 2 verrsions are the exact same. Only layout changes due to handheld specific browsing. Are there any speficific precausions I could take or best practices to ensure that Google does not see the mobile pages as duplicates of the desktop pages Does anyone know solid best practices to achieve maximum results for running an idential mobile version of your main site?1