Duplicate page errors
-
I have 102 duplicate page title errors and 64 duplicate page content errors. They are almost all from the email a friend forms that are on each product of my online store. I looked and the pages are identical except for the product name. Is this a real problem and if so is there a work around or should I see if I can turn off the email a friend option? Thanks for any information you can give me.
Cingin Gifts
-
Thanks for the good advice everyone. I really appreciate it.
Keith
-
Odds are that this isn't causing you major problems yet, but if the variants are indexed by Google (you can check with the "site:" operator), I would use the META robots tag. Robots.txt is good for prevention, but it's not great at clearing pages out of the index, in my experience.
-
The change you made to the robots should be sufficient. You can also add the meta tag in there to be doubly sure, but its not needed
Though, your social buttons has the Email A Friend option built in so you are replicating the same functionality with the Email a Friend button.
No problem, happy to help.
Aran
- if your problem is solved, dont forget the Answered, and Good answer buttons
-
Hi Aran,
I added that line to my robots.txt file.
User-agent:*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /v/vspfiles/photos/
Disallow: /EmailaFriend.aspSomeone else recommended adding the following line to the EmailAFriend.asp file. Do I need this line?
I like the suggestion for removing the email a friend and working more on the social area. I thought turning off the email part was probably the easiest fix for the duplicate pages.
Thanks for the great advice!
Keith
-
Looking at your site I see that your Email a friend script is opening a brand new page and passing through the product ID. To stop the page being indexed you can add the following line to the robots.txt
Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp
afte the line that looks something like
User-Agent: *
Heres some light reading on the robots.txt file
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt
BE CAUTIOUS! if you dont know what your doing seek further assistance as you could do some bad things in the robots.txt.
Whilst the solution above will probably solve your duplicate page issue. I think there is room for improvement here.
Email a friend scripts needn't take the user away from the product they are viewing. You could open the email a friend script in a new window, or even better get rid of the Email a friend button altogether and make your social sharing buttons bigger and more prominent. Also, consider giving the users a Call to Action to sharing the product via the social buttons.
Hope this helps.
Aran
-
Hi Steven, I just got that report from seomoz and those errors were returned from their crawling of the site. I'm new to this SEO stuff so I'm not sure about the indexing thing. I do know a little about the robots.txt file so I'll look into blocking those pages.
Thanks,
Keith
-
Do they need to be indexed? Perhaps you should consider using blocking any spider from crawling them using robots and using a noindex meta tag.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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 in crawl despite canonical
Hi! I've had a bunch of duplicate content issues come up in a crawl, but a lot of them seem to have canonical tags implemented correctly. For example: http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Fireplaces http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Nursery http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Turntables http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Turntables?page=0 Aztec http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Turntables?page=1 Any ideas on what's happening here?
Moz Pro | | neooptic0 -
"On-Page Report Card"- why is still showing " F grade" after introducing the keyword in page and title.
Hello, "On-Page Report Card"- why is still showing " F grade" after introducing the keyword in page and title. After changing the title and putting the keyword inside the title, in this section, "Exact Keyword Usage in Page Title", it shows the first title, without updating my changes. I have updated several times. In some cases worked, in this case doesn't. For example "online project management software" grades F, and "project management software" grades A, even if I've put the "online" word in title an so on. Now I have the same issue with "stock management software" which grades F. "stock management" grades A, even if i've put exactly "stock management software" thanks.
Moz Pro | | directspark0 -
Page Authority Bulk Check?
Hi all, Was wondering if maybe using the SEOmoz API there was a way to check in excel the page authority of 500 URLs or more? Or is there a different way to do this? Thanks, Carlos
Moz Pro | | Carlos-R0 -
Seomoz & Duplicate Page Content Issue?
Hi, What is the criteria on Seomoz Crawl Diagnostic Report? I got a long list of URLs indicating Content that is identical (or nearly identical) to content on other pages of your site forces your pages to unnecessarily compete with each other for rankings. But as I gone through none of the reported pages duplicate. What should I do? Thanks in Advance
Moz Pro | | VipinLouka780 -
Why are these pages considered duplicate page content?
A recent crawl diagnostic for a client's website had several new duplicate page content errors. The problem is, I'm not sure where the error comes from since the content in the webpage is different from one another. Here's the pages that SEOMOZ reported to have duplicate page content errors: http://www.imaginet.com.ph/wireless-internet-service-providers-term http://www.imaginet.com.ph/antivirus-term http://www.imaginet.com.ph/berkeley-internet-name-domain http://www.imaginet.com.ph/customer-premises-equipment-term The only thing similar that I see is the headline which says "Glossary Terms Used in this Site" - I hope that the one sentence is the reason for the error. Any input is appreciated as I want to find out the best solution for my client's website errors. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | TheNorthernOffice790 -
Different Moz Scores Between Page and Subdomain
The Moz scores for a page-specific website:: www.website.com are different than the subdomain: www.website.com/. www.website.com: Page MozRank: 4.58
Moz Pro | | DanSpeicher
Page MozTrust: 4.9 www.website.com/ Subdomain MozRank: 5.21
Subdomain MozTrust 5.18 Does that have any significance? Should I be routing pages to the " / " version? Thanks, Daniel0 -
Crawl Diagnostics bringing 20k+ errors as duplicate content due to session ids
Signed up to the trial version of Seomoz today just to check it out as I have decided I'm going to do my own SEO rather than outsource it (been let down a few times!). So far I like the look of things and have a feeling I am going to learn a lot and get results. However I have just stumbled on something. After Seomoz dones it's crawl diagnostics run on the site (www.deviltronics.com) it is showing 20,000+ plus errors. From what I can see almost 99% of this is being picked up as erros for duplicate content due to session id's, so i am not sure what to do! I have done a "site:www.deviltronics.com" on google and this certainly doesn't pick up the session id's/duplicate content. So could this just be an issue with the Seomoz bot. If so how can I get Seomoz to ignore these on the crawl? Can I get my developer to add some code somewhere. Help will be much appreciated. Asif
Moz Pro | | blagger0