Duplicate Titles caused by multiple variations of same URL
-
Hi. Can you please advise how I can overcome this issue. Moz.com crawle is indicating I have 100's of Duplicate Title tag errors. However this is caused because many URL's have been indexed multiple times in Google. For example.
www.abc.com
www.abc.com/?b=123What can I do to stop this issue being reported as duplictae Titles, as well as content?
I was thinking maybe I can use Robots.txt to block various query string parameters. I'm Open to ideas and examples.
-
Depending on how you implement the canonicals, you should see a decrease in your duplicate errors, which will be replaced by canonical notices. Ideally, there won't be anything to ignore.
-
Thank you for your response.
Does this mean for each main page I have i.e.
etc,
if I put a Rel="canonical", I can then ignore messages of duplicate content for URL's reported such as
abc.com/page1 (put a rel="canonical" on this page)
abc.com/page2 (put a rel="canonical" on this page)
abc.com/index.html (put a rel="canonical" on this page)
etc,
?
-
*Edit: Miki beat me to it, but here's a little more explanation.
The first thing to note here is that Google's indexing doesn't actually have any effect on your Moz crawl report. All of the data you see there comes from our very own rogerbot, which crawls similarly to googlebot.
Though Google's crawler has a wide variety of ways to locate and index content, rogerbot can only crawl links on your site. If your crawl report is picking up each of these URLs, then there must be links pointing to those URLs somewhere on your site. The danger here is that Google and the other search engines will pick up those variants and not be able to determine which of them is the "real" one. That could lead to a) Google listing a URL you'd rather it didn't, or b) Google not understanding how to list your site at all.
A few of these have pretty simple fixes—index.html should be 301 redirected to your root domain, for example. Rel="canonical" is very applicable here, too. Here are a couple resources you may want to check out:
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization - Best practices article on canonicalization
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection - Best practices article on redirectsI hope that helps!
Matt Roney
Moz Customer Mentor -
I would redirect all variations to www.abc.com as well as REL=Canonical back to www.abc.com. This should solve you issues.
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
-
Is This Considered Duplicate Content?
My site has entered SEO hell and I am not sure how to fix it. Up until 18 months ago I had tremendous success on Google and Bing and now my website appears below my Facebook page for the term "Direct Mail Raleigh." What makes it even more frustrating is my competitors have done no SEO and they are dominating this keyword. I thought that the issue was due to harmful inbound links and two months ago I disavowed ones that were clearly spam. Somehow my site has actually gone down! I have a blog that I have updated infrequently and I do not know if it I am getting punished for duplicate content. On Google Webmaster Tools it says I have 279 crawled and indexed pages. Yesterday when I ran the MOZ crawl check I was amazed to find 1150 different webpages on my site. Despite the fact that it does not appear on the webmaster tools I have three different webpages due to the format that the Wordpress blog was created: "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/part2leadershi/", "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/page/91/" and "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/category/competent-leadership/page/3/" What does not make sense to me is why Google only indexed 279 webpages AND why MOZ did not identify these three webpages as duplicate content with the Crawl Test Tool. Does anyone have any ideas? Would it be as easy as creating a massive robot.txt file and just putting 2 of the 3 URLs in that file? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DR700950 -
Duplicate Content Issues :(
I am wondering how we can solve our duplicate content issues. Here is the thing: There are so many ways you can write a description about a used watch. http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-no-date-stainless-steel-watch-wsilver-dial-5500/ http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-stainless-steel-date-watch-wblue-dial-5500/ Whats different between these two? The dial color. We have a lot of the same model numbers but with different conditions, dial colors, and bands.. What ideas do you have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KingRosales0 -
URLs: Removing duplicate pages using anchor?
I've been working on removing duplicate content on our website. There are tons of pages created based on size but the content is the same. The solution was to create a page with 90% static content and 10% dynamic, that changed depending on the "size" Users can select the size from a dropdown box. So instead of 10 URLs, I now have one URL. Users can access a specific size by adding an anchor to the end of the URL (?f=suze1, ?f=size2) For e.g: Old URLs. www.example.com/product-alpha-size1 www.example.com/product-alpha-size2 www.example.com/product-alpha-size3 www.example.com/product-alpha-size4 www.example.com/product-alpha-size5 New URLs www.example.com/product-alpha-size1 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size2 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size3 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size4 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size5 Do search engines read the anchor or drop them? Will the rank juice be transfered to just www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Complex URL Migration
Hi There, I have three separate questions which are all related. Some brief back ground. My client has an adventure tourism company that takes predominantly North American customers on adventure tours to three separate destinations: New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. They previously had these sites on their own URL's. These URL's had the destination in the URL (eg: sitenewzealand.com). 2 of the three URL's had good age and lots of incoming links. This time last year a new web company was bought in and convinced them to pull all three sites onto a single domain and to put the sites under sub folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand). The built a brand new site for them on a Joomla platform. Unfortunately the new sites have not performed and halved the previous call to action rates. Organic traffic was not adversely affected with this change, however it hasn't grown either. I have been overhauling these new sites with a project team and we have managed to keep the new design but make usability/marketing changes that have the conversion rate nearly back to where it originally was and we have managed to keep the new design (and the CMS) in place. We have recently made programmatic changes to the joomla system to push the separate destination sites back onto their original URL's. My first question is around whether technically this was a good idea. Question 1 Does our logic below add up or is it flawed logic? The reasons we decided to migrate the sites back onto their old URL's were: We have assumed that with the majority of searches containing the actual destination (eg: "New Zealand") that all other things being equal it is likely to attract a higher click through rate on the domain www.sitenewzealand.com than for www.site.com/new-zealand. Having the "newzealand" in the actual URL would provide a rankings boost for target keyword phrases containing "new zealand" in them. We also wanted to create the consumer perception that we are specialists in each of the destinations which we service rather than having a single site which positions us as a "multi-destination" global travel company. Two of the old sites had solid incoming links and there has been very little new links acquired for the domain used for the past 12 months. It was also assumed that with the sites on their own domains that the theme for each site would be completely destination specific rather than having the single site with multiple destinations on it diluting this destination theme relevance. It is assumed that this would also help us to rank better for the destination specific search phrases (which account for 95% of all target keyword phrases). The downsides of this approach were that we were splitting out content onto three sites instead of one with a presumed associated drop in authority overall. The other major one was the actual disruption that a relatively complex domain migration could cause. Opinions on the logic we adopted for deciding to split these domains out would be highly appreciated. Question 2 We migrated the folder based destination specific sites back onto their old domains at the start of March. We were careful to thoroughly prepare the htaccess file to ensure we covered off all the new redirects needed and to directly redirect the old redirects to the new pages. The structure of each site and the content remained the same across the destination specific folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand/hiking became sitenewzealand.com/hiking). To achieve this splitting out of sites and the ability to keep the single instance of Joomla we wrote custom code to dynamically rewrite the URL's. This worked as designed. Unfortunately however, Joomla had a component which was dynamically creating the google site maps and as this had not had any code changes it got all confused and started feeding up a heap of URL's which never previously existed. This resulted in each site having 1000 - 2000 404's. It took us three weeks to work this out and to put a fix into place. This has now been done and we are down to zero 404's for each site in GWT and we have proper google site maps submitted (all done 3 days ago). In the meantime our organic rankings and traffic began to decline after around 5 days (after the migration) and after 10 days had dropped down to around 300 daily visitors from around 700 daily visitors. It has remained at that level for the past 2 weeks with no sign of any recovery. Now that we have fixed the 404's and have accurate site maps into google, how long do you think it will take to start to see an upwards trend again and how long it is likely to take to get to similar levels of organic traffic compared to pre-migration levels? (if at all). Question 3 The owner of the company is understandably nervous about the overall situation. He is wishing right now that we had never made the migration. If we decided to roll back to what we previously had are we likely to cause further recovery delays and would it come back to what we previously had in a reasonably quick time frame? A huge thanks to everyone for reading what is quite a technical and lengthy post and a big thank you in advance for any answers. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activenz
Conrad0 -
Tabs and duplicate content?
We own this site http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/ and just a little concerned as I right clicked open in new tab on the tab content section and it went to a new page For example if you right click on the price tab and click open in new tab you will end up with the url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson
http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/#tabThree Does this mean that our content is being duplicated onto another page? If so what should I do?0 -
If it's not in Webmaster Tools, is it Duplicate Title
I am showing a lot of errors in my SEOmoz reports for duplicate content and duplicate titles, many of which appear to be related to capitalization vs non-capitalization in the URL. Case in point, if a URL contains a lower character, such as: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/allyson-krowitz/distinct-microstructure-i as opposed to the same URL having an upper character in the structure: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/allyson-krowitz/distinct-microstructure-I I am finding that some of the internal links on the site use the former structure and other links use the latter structure. These show as duplicate title/content in the SEOmoz reports, but they don't appear as duplicate titles in Webmaster Tools. My question is, should I try to work with our developers to create a script to change all of the content with cap letters in the destination links internally on the site, or is this a non-issue since it doesn't appear in Webmaster Tools?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0 -
Prowling report says "duplicate titles" for wp-login.php
Hi there, How are you guys doing? I have a quick question. The last prowling report we received said we have three pages with "duplicate titles". Those three pages are: /wp-login.php wp-login.php?action=lostpassword /wp-login.php?action=register I'm a little confused because those pages don't even have a title. Do you think it's a big deal? Also do you have any idea of why the prowling report says those pages have duplicate titles? Apparently, wp-login.php is part of the Wordpress core. It's a built-in page that
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ericc22
handles login and registration. Not something we can edit. Thanks a lot and have a nice day!0