Is reported duplication on the pages or their canonical pages?
-
There are several sections getting flagged for duplication on one of our sites:
http://mysite.com/section-1/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-2/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-3/?something=X&confirmed=trueEach of the above are showing as having duplicates of the other sections. Indeed, these pages are exactly the same (it's just an SMS confirmation page you enter your code in), however, they all have canonical links back to the section (without the query string), i.e. section-1, section-2 and section-3 respectively.
These three sections have unique content and aren't flagged up for duplications themselves, so my questions are:
Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates, and if so why are the canonical links being ignored?
or
Are the canonical pages without the query strings the duplicates, and if so why don't they appear as URLs in their own right in the duplicate content report?
I am guessing it's the former, but I can't figure out why it would ignore the canonical links. Any ideas?
Thanks
-
This is good news sugar-coating bad news Thanks!
-
Hi,
The URLs that are reported by the crawl as being duplicates are the duplicate pages. Unfortunately the way the crawl from SEOMoz works, it does not factor the rel=canonical tag when reporting duplicates. In other words, even with the tag implemented, it will still report these pages as duplicates. Don't worry though, as long as the tag is implemented, the search engines should treat the canonical like a 301 redirect and not penalise you for duplicate content.
So to answer your question:
Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates? - Yes.
Hope that helps,
Adam
-
Hey,
It's kind of tricky to answer this without seeing at least two of the category pages but I am guessing that the duplication is in the category pages themselves and if they are simply very thin pages with little to differentiate category A from category B then there is your problem.
Rather than look at the web tool, if you export the spreadsheet this is a lot easier to understand and for each page there is a duplication column which has a comma separated list of the pages that are being flagged as possible duplicates so this should answer your question.
What to do though?
I may be telling you how to suck eggs but this is always a good read when it comes to thin content problems and solutions:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-contentIf it was me, and these pages are thin, but that is the way they are supposed to be, and they are not really search landing pages then there is a good argument to noindex them and remove the possibility of them causing you any problems. If you do this, next time the campaign tool crawls your site they will be ignored and will not show up as a possible duplicate.
Obviously, from a Panda perspective, if these pages are listed as thin, they could be damaging other pages on the site so it is certainly an issue worth addressing.
Hope this helps!
Marcus
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
-
301 to canonical
I'm doing some work on a website, they have a very popular product search where you enter a specific part code (6 digits) and it takes you to the product. So for example Search: 123456 Page redirected to domain.com/product/123456 With a canonical of domain.com/product/this-is-the-product-title Would it be beneficial to redirect from /product/123456 to /product/this-is-the-product-title Google seems to be indexing both versions. For some of these products a reasonable amount of links are built.
On-Page Optimization | | ThomasHarvey0 -
What is the Impact of Canonical to a Canonical Page?
hey folks, How does google respond to this, canonical to a canonical page? i.e page A is canonical to Page which is already/also canonical to PAGE C. Thanks In advance AK
On-Page Optimization | | AnkammaRao0 -
Does having landing page text beneath the products at the base of the page hinder SEO?
I have a site that is capable of hosting the landing page description either above the products under the H1 or below them at the bottom of the page before the footer. I have always chosen to keep the text "above the fold" as presumably this would be crawled sooner in relation to the rest of the page content than had it been at the bottom. However, this means that I can only really write just a few sentences for each landing page - otherwise the products would shift further down the page - and I don't think this is good from a UX POV. Question: If I move the bulk of my landing page descriptions to the text snippet located underneath the products, could this negatively affect my SEO? Text at the bottom of the page is obviously not significant for users, so is there a chance this could be seen as spam?
On-Page Optimization | | Silkstream0 -
On Page Optimization Reports for Google UK Grade A - F
Hi, Can someone please explain how it is that one of my keywords ranks as a Grade A and a Grade F? This doesn't seem to make any sense? Thanks in advance. Heather
On-Page Optimization | | T1RBO0 -
Why is this page not ranking?
Can you please tell me why this page is not ranking. http://goo.gl/BqoRT The page doesn't rank at all for keywords but even if I copy a line or 2 of text it still doesn't rank for that text. Any help will be much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | JillB20130 -
Can't canonical, but need pages to show in Google News
We are a news media site in which much of our content is third-party, and already published by several other sources. Our current version of our CMS doesn't expose head tags, so I can't canonical to the original and avoid a duplicate content penalty. Is it ok for news sites NOT to use canonical, or do I have to NOINDEX until our CMS is fixed?
On-Page Optimization | | Aggie0 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi Guys, First off, it's an honour to be a part of this awesome community. I'm using WordPress and getting top 3 rankings for great keywords and I'm very excited, however my page titles are in this format "keyword optimised title here - site name here" eg: "This is my keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is another keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is a longtail keyword - this is the name of my blog" SEOMoz is reporting errors because of duplicate page title tags due to the "this is the name of my blog" being in every page title. Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks in advance and keep up the great work! Cheers, Troy.
On-Page Optimization | | TroyDean710 -
3 keywords optomize for home page. Should I create page with thoses keywords or leave it like this?
My online store home page, Furnace Filters Canada has 3 keywords with good ranking in google.ca keywords: ''furnace filters canada'' rank #1 position in google.ca keywords: ''furnace filters'' and ''furnace filter'' are on 5 or 6th position of page 1 in google.ca Those keywords are bringing most of the traffic to our site. To achieve this ranking, I had to use the On-Page Keyword Optimization, tool from seoMoz Questions: It is possible for me to create a page with the URL: https://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/Furnace-Filters or https://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/Furnace-Filter Can this improve my ranking with keywords like, ''furnace filters'' and ''furnace filter''? Is this a waist of time? If I decide to create a new page for optimization with, do I have to create one for singular and another one for plural? Creating a new page also mean removing, '' Furnace Filter'' in the home page title, until the new pages are index, I'm afraid to loss that 5th position in Google. Should I leave the home page title like it is now, '' Furnace Filter - Furnace Filters Canada - Online Shopping Store NOTE: we only do business in Canada, that is why Google.ca is more important to us Thank you, Jean Nichols
On-Page Optimization | | BigBlaze2050