I have a duplicate content on my Moz crawler, but google hasn't indexed those pages: do I still need to get rid of the tags?
-
I received an urgent error from the Moz crawler that I have duplicate content on my site due to the tags I have. For example:
http://www.1forjustice.com/graves-amendment/
The real article found here: http://www.1forjustice.com/car-accident-rental-car/
I didn't think this was a big deal, because when I looked at my GWT these pages weren't indexed (picture attached).
Question: should I bother fixing this from an SEO perspective? If Google isn't indexing the pages, then am I losing link juice?
-
It will fully depend on the purpose of each page. In the example case you mentioned, that will be the best solution, but canonical tags =/= noindex tags. I would only suggest using canonical tags if there's a large amount of similar content between pages.
For noindex, I generally don't use them unless I specifically don't want a certain page to be indexed (highly-targeted PPC landing pages are a good example) - you usually don't want to deindex pages without a reason/goal.
If there's lots of duplicate content issues on your site, here are two possible options for cleaning them up, from most ideal to least:
- Identify duplicate pages and revise the content itself so that it's sufficiently unique. Remove all noindex and canonical tags unless they were already in place for another reason.
- Use canonical tags to consolidate two or more pages. This will essentially act as a 301 redirect while still allowing users to view the canonicalized pages if they come across them. Your 'best' page of the group shouldn't have any canonical tag on it. This approach should only be used for duplicate content-related issues, not as a substitute for proper redirects if that's what the situation calls for.
Either way, I would remove the noindex tags from your pages unless they were specifically put there for a reason. If you've noticed a bunch, make sure there isn't a toggle or checkbox in you CMS' admin panel that is adding it by default to new pages.
Good luck!
-
Excellent! Thank you, so do I have to go through and add a canonical tags to all of the tagged pages? Sounds like it will take a while, but it also sounds like I don't have many choices.
-
You should be relatively safe from duplicate content issues at the moment, however you're leaving some 'link juice' on the table since whatever equity is in the noindexed page is remaining with it.
If you want to consolidate the pages from a search engine point of view, but still have them both accessible on your site, then you should remove the noindex from the page and add a canonical tag on the less-important page (pointing to the other page). The more important page won't need any additional tags.
The page with the canonical tag won't be accessible from search engines if you do this, so another route is to develop the content on each page a bit more so that they're more dissimilar; you wouldn't need any tags in this case.
-
Excellent response. So would I go through and add the canonical tag to all tag pages?
This duplicate content won't hurt my site because those pages aren't indexed right?
-
I'm not sure if I understand the question, but the reason the Graves Amendment page isn't being indexed isn't due to duplicate content, it's because of the meta noindex tag on there:
Removing that from the page should get it indexed. If the pages have very similar copy, with slight nuances, I would use a canonical tag to consolidate all of the equity into the 'primary' page to help avoid any duplicate content issues. Hope that helps!
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
-
How to Avoid Duplicate Page Content errors when using Wordpress Categories & Tags?
I get a lot of duplicate page errors on my crawl diagnostics reports from 'categories' and 'tags' on my wordpress sites. The post is 1x link and then the content is 'duplicated' on the 'category' or 'tag' that is added to the page. Should I exclude the tags and categories from my sitemap or are these issues not that important? Thanks for your help Stacey
Moz Pro | | skehoe1 -
301 Redirects - But still duplicate content?
Our website domain website.com redirects to website.com/en (since it's in English). Therefore, all pages on website.com redirects to website.com/en. In my Moz analytics, it says I have duplicate content, and lists all of these pages. Didn't the 301 redirects take care of the duplicate content? Or do I still have to add canonical tags?
Moz Pro | | Taulia0 -
MOZ Toolbar 3.0: Can't Find the Meta Description On My Page, Why?
Hey, The new MOZ toolbar is unable to identify the meta description on any of the pages for my doman www.1099pro.com. Is there any reason that someone can see why that would be? The tag should be correct on all pages. Thanks! -Mike
Moz Pro | | Stew2220 -
Duplicate page report
We ran a CSV spreadsheet of our crawl diagnostics related to duplicate URLS' after waiting 5 days with no response to how Rogerbot can be made to filter. My IT lead tells me he thinks the label on the spreadsheet is showing “duplicate URLs”, and that is – literally – what the spreadsheet is showing. It thinks that a database ID number is the only valid part of a URL. To replicate: Just filter the spreadsheet for any number that you see on the page. For example, filtering for 1793 gives us the following result: | URL http://truthbook.com/faq/dsp_viewFAQ.cfm?faqID=1793 http://truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793 http://truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793&pf=true http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1793 http://www.truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793 | There are a couple of problems with the above: 1. It gives the www result, as well as the non-www result. 2. It is seeing the print version as a duplicate (&pf=true) but these are blocked from Google via the noindex header tag. 3. It thinks that different sections of the website with the same ID number the same thing (faq / blogs / pages) In short: this particular report tell us nothing at all. I am trying to get a perspective from someone at SEOMoz to determine if he is reading the result correctly or there is something he is missing? Please help. Jim
Moz Pro | | jimmyzig0 -
How come the linking root domains doesn't download to the cvs when I try to create a "Top Pages" report?
How come the linking root domains tab doesn't download to the cvs when I try to create a "Top Pages" report?
Moz Pro | | mrmworldwidesearch0 -
Why does SEO Moz say we are ranked lower than appears on Google Searches?
We are currently ranked 18th for the Sydney Vet keyword in SEO Moz ranking tools, however in organic Google search we are ranked third. This search was conducted without Googles personalised results feature. Is this just an error? Or does it have something to do with Google Places not being counted in SEO Moz ranking tools? Any help would be much appreciated.
Moz Pro | | Peter.Huxley590 -
Getting your site totally indexed by SEOMOZ
Hi guys! Ijust started using SEOMOZ software and wondered how it could be that my site has over 10.000 pages but in the Pro Dashboard it only indexed about 1500 of them. I've been waiting a few weeks now but the number has been stable ever since. Is there a way to get the whole site indexed by SEOMoz software? Thanks for your answers!
Moz Pro | | ssiebn70