Duplicate content & canonicals
-
Hi,
Working on a website for a company that works in different european countries.
The setup is like this:
www.website.eu/nl
www.website.eu/be
www.website.eu/fr
...You see that every country has it's own subdir, but NL & BE share the same language, dutch...
The copywriter wrote some unique content for NL and for BE, but it isn't possible to write unique for every product detail page because it's pretty technical stuff that goes into those pages.
Now we want to add canonical tags to those identical product pages. Do we point the canonical on the /be products to /nl products or visa versa?
Other question regarding SEOmoz: If we add canonical tags to x-pages, do they still appear in the Crawl Errors "duplicate page content", or do we have to do our own math and just do "duplicate page content" minus "Rel canonical" ?
-
Hey Joris,
As of now it will most likely see it as duplicate content, because technically it still is duplicate content to a crawler bot, they won't know your intentions or target audience for each subfolder. The only way you could get around our crawler seeing it as duplicate is by blocking rogerbot with robots.txt or meta robots from that subfolder. Then there is putting up relconanoicals, which is the best way.
Hope this sheds some light on the duplicate content issues.
Best,
Nick
SEOmoz -
Thanks Robert!
-
Will do!
-
Now, that was a good question. Why not send a quick email to [email protected] and just ask if there is a way to circumvent? LMK please.
-
Hi Robert,
Thx for your quick answer, I will make sure that in Google Webmaster Tools we say that the /be is for Belgium and the /nl for The Netherlands, but the duplicate content will still show up in our reports in SEOmoz, no?
-
First question is: Have you thought of using the .cc instead of the sub directory? Rand speaks to the .fr issue in his WBF mentioned by iBiz Leverage.
As to canonical to avoid duplicate content, you shouldn't have a duplicate content issue even with the two languages so long as you set your country target for each. But, read or watch the WBF by Rand as it is full of info on this subject and domain auth, etc.
-
I have same problem and found this URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo
Here is also another link from SEOmoz; i think this is most helpful: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Hope this can help.
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
-
Unsolved Next JS and Missing content
Hello
Moz Pro | | 4thWhale
We recently migrated our page to next JS which is supposed to be great for SEO
On almost all our pages we are getting the same errors Missing Canonical Tag Missing Title Missing or Invalid H1 Missing Description We don't understand this because we have all of that content on every page. We believe that maybe NextJs is having a incompatibility with Moz. Has anyone had any experience with this?0 -
Unsolved Moz Pro crawl signaling missing canonical which are not?
Hi,
Moz Pro | | rolandvintners
I'm trying MozPro considering using it.
One of the tool which is appealing is the crawl and insights.
After quick use, I really question many of the alerts, for instance, I got a "missing canonical tag" on this url: https://vintners.co/wine/grawu_gto#2020 but when I check my markup, there's clearly a canonical tag: <link rel="canonical" href="https://vintners.co/wine/grawu_gto"> Anybody can explain?
I asked Moz Pro staff when being onboarded but didn't get an answer...
Honestly, I'm questioning the value of these crawls, or may be I miss something?0 -
Duplicate content flagged by Moz that's not actually duplicate content at all
Hi, Moz has flagged a whole lot of pages as dupe content, but I cannot see how they qualify as such.
Moz Pro | | Caro-O
Not sure if I'm allowed to post actual URLs here....happy to if I can, but I feel certain that the pages are not 90% similar. Has anyone else had this experience? ~Caro1 -
Canonical tag on webstore products to avoid Duplicate Page Content ?
Hi, I would like to have an opinion on what how we are planning to solve the issue with Duplicate Page Contents that MOZ PRO is showing us. MOZ Pro is showing us a lot of pages with duplicate content as High Priority Issue. Mainly the problem is with products which have very few differences between them, e.g. pink bike model X and red bike model X. So we decided to implement a canonical tag on these products, and the pink bike model X will now have a canonical pointing to the red bike model X. So hopefully we will be ranking higher with our red bike model X and our pink bike model X will disapear from the index. Am I right ? Is it a good practice, since we will loose long tails indexes? I check each canonical in the Search Console, and we have extremely few searched for "pink bike model X" most of searches are "bike model X". Thank you in advance for your opinion. Isabelle
Moz Pro | | isabelledylag0 -
Losing Rankings & Need Help
Hi Guys, I am not sure if anyone else is suffering from the July 4, 2013 update. I know many of us are awaiting to see what happens once the dust settles. I have a couple of issues/questions/statements below. This is the first time any Google update has every affected me negatively and I'd love some ideas or input. 1. I have ranked quite well for nearly 10 years for all my top keywords. Now, after this update, I am disappearing for my top keywords in the SERPS - definitely getting pushed to page two, etc. Can anyone help me discover the reasons? I have a great SEO expert helping me and I know quite a bit, but this has me baffled. My website is Journey Beyond Travel.com I have read MOZ's ranking factors for 2013 and also the recently published report from SearchMetrics. In the last few days, I've added more quality text to the homepage and shortened my page title on the homepage (although Google has been changing my homepage browser title to put my brand name first in the title - and they haven't for my competitors). Over the past few months, I've really cleaned up my link profile to the best of my ability. I've never really taken part in any negative or black-hat practices. I am trying to get more links that use my 'brand' name rather than exact anchor text. I believe I have a natural profile - any thoughts? 2. One thing I notice is the higher ranking of larger brands now (at least in my field). Just because a domain with higher authority creates one page of content, how can that outrank me? I mean, I've got ten years and 600+ darn good articles of content on my website. How can one domain that is very 'general' (for example, well known in the world of travel and not specialized or niche like mine) outrank me? How can it be that Google allows larger brands to outrank smaller ones just because they have more backlinks and domain authority, but no real content to support these pages? Is content truly king? I am thinking about an article: "Google, Brands, and the Death of Small Business Online." Anyone wish to collaborate here? I am not being hatelful or resentful, but I foresee the day when an 'alternative' search engine emerges, doesn't allow crap ads, allows users more flexibility, and brings search to the next level. Not all of us want the big brands and are searching for alternatives that stand out. I ignore them when I am searching mostly. Any thoughts or elaborations? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | journeybeyondtravel1 -
Crawl Diagnostics - Canonical Question
On one of my sites I have 61 notices for Rel Canonical. Is it bad to have these or is this just something that's informative?
Moz Pro | | kadesmith0 -
'Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical', Critical Factor but appears correct on page
Hi, Trying to get the following page ranked unsuccessfully.... http://www.joules.com/en-GB/2/Collections-Quilted-Jackets/c01c02.r16.1 Instead a product page is being ranked, shown below.... http://www.joules.com/en-GB/Womens-Quilted-Jacket/Navy/M_HAMPTON/ProductDetail.raction When I run the on page report card it advises that the Rel Canonical tag needs to point to that page, but we have checked and it looks to be doing that already. Has anyone else had an issue like this? Thanks, Martin
Moz Pro | | rockethot0 -
Broken Links and Duplicate Content Errors?
Hello everybody, I’m new to SEOmoz and I have a few quick questions regarding my error reports: In the past, I have used IIS as a tool to uncover broken links and it has revealed a large amount of varying types of "broken links" on our sites. For example, some of them were links on my site that went to external sites that were no longer available, others were missing images in my CSS and JS files. According to my campaign in SEOmoz, however, my site has zero broken links (4XX). Can anyone tell me why the IIS errors don’t show up in my SEOmoz report, and which of these two reports I should really be concerned about (for SEO purposes)? 2. Also in the "errors" section, I have many duplicate page titles and duplicate page content errors. Many of these "duplicate" content reports are actually showing the same page more than once. For example, the report says that "http://www.cylc.org/" has the same content as "http://www.cylc.org/index.cfm" and that, of course, is because they are the same page. What is the best practice for handling these duplicate errors--can anyone recommend an easy fix for this?
Moz Pro | | EnvisionEMI0