Duplicated content detected with MOZ crawl with canonical applied
-
Hi there!
I have a slight problem.
I have a site with Joomla 3.3 that we recently migrated from 2.5.Joomla, for some reason that I don´t really get, creates hundreds of weird urls for the site like
mydomain.com/en -> joomla creates en/home/149-xxx-xxx/xxxxxx-xxxxxx that links to the first one.
The new version 3.3 knows this bug and applies a rel=canonical to the ones created "artificially", so they should not be identified as duplicated.Sample piece of code: en/home/149-all-en/xxxxxxx-xxxxxx" rel="canonical" /
MOZ crawler identifies this as duplicated and like this I have thousands of pages duplicated all with titles, content etc... all the ones created by joomla. Still my site has good SEO results and I can not see any penalties but I am a bit concerned they may come in the future....
Can anyone explain me what is happening?
Thank you in advance for your time,
-
If it's a period of 2 weeks and you're going to do it anyways, I would just make the new content and not go to the expense of setting up redirects and then taking them down, which can cause issues when you plan on recreating a URL.
-
Thank you for your time!
We are going to setup 301 redirects (one colleague suggested importing those directly in the DB of redirects) from those duplicated pages until joomla has a native solution and we have the time to make all unique content, to avoid penalties.
At least, we would solve temporaly the problem, it will take 2 weeks to make all the unique content.
Would that make sense?
Have a nice weekend!
-
I personally would not generate new language sections unless the content has been translated and localized on those pages. Right now your Spanish homepage has English content in the body, so I would view this as incomplete. Ideally you'd translate the entire page for those sections.
When you do that, you'll want to use hreflang, not canonicals, to indicate different versions of the same content.
So, my recommendation is (A) get rid of the Spanish content sections which would solve the duplication problem, or (B) finish translating the content and then install hreflang code, which would also solve the duplication problem.
Unfortunately I don't know of a good hreflang tool for Joomla specifically.
Let me know if that makes sense?
-
Thank you Kane.
I would like to keep the content in all the languages, ,as I think it is useful for customers to enter easily certain areas.
The problem that I am always having is the implementation...There are not real good canonical plugins (that would allow me to do a bulk import), and I am not that advanced as for doing an htaccess redirect with 301... still, I would like that if someone from NL or FI version would like to find the area barcelona could see it....
Anything on mind!? Just to say, I tried SH404, does all the work but rewrites the whole url structure (not possible), I tried canonical http://www.cmsplugin.com/products/components/4-canonical-url which solves the duplication by languages but not the random urls created by 3.3...
Then I decided to leave the plugin I mentioned before, it deletes all the duplicated urls generated automatically but does not solve the language problem...So, here I am
Any suggestion?
-
Also, if you decide to keep the /es/ section of the website then you'll need to look into hreflang instead of canonical tags, because /es/ and /en/ will not be duplicate content once they're translated.
Read this Q&A from Google for details - https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q20
-
Hey Jose,
If you have an /es/ subfolder then ideally you would be translating that content to Spanish, not canonicalizing that content back to the English version.
I can see from http://www.spain-internship.com/es/internships-in-salamanca that not all /es/ pages are translated - is this true across the entire website?
If you don't have any Spanish content, then you should just kill off the /es/ version entirely.
-
Hi there,
Thanks for the update. Now that you told me the problem I found out this is a known bug for joomla and I am working on it.
I found a plugin http://styleware.eu/store/item/26-styleware-content-canonical-plugin that sends all the duplicated urls, generated automatically with a canonical to the home.Sample:
http://www.spain-internship.com/en/home/149-all-en/placement-spain
Now with the link http://www.spain-internship.com" rel="canonical" />.This solves the problem of the core canonical bug.
Would this be a proper solution?Now I only have to change all the ones duplicated due to languages config, block then in robots or canonical but as far as I control it, it is ok.
Please, let me know if this would be a proper solution.
Thank you in advance for your help, if I can help you in some moment with something here we are!
-
Ok, the problem is your pages are all canonical to themselves, the canonical tag should point at the main page for the content, not to every page. For your first example, all pages that get their content from http://www.spain-internship.com/en need to have canonical tags to that page, instead the copy page has this:
href="http://www.spain-internship.com/fi/etusivu/186-all-fi/home-page-fi" rel="canonical" />
it should have
href="http://www.spain-internship.com/fi/" rel="canonical" />
-
I will provide few so you can look!
Detected as duplicated:
http://www.spain-internship.com/en
http://www.spain-internship.com/en/home/149-all-en/placement-spainSame here:
http://www.spain-internship.com/fi
http://www.spain-internship.com/fi/etusivu/186-all-fi/home-page-fihttp://www.spain-internship.com/en/internships-in-salamanca
http://www.spain-internship.com/es/internships-in-salamancaFirst one is the original. The rest one have canonical. Still detected as duplicated.
-
Do you have an example of one of these generated pages as well, everything looks fine on the main page.
-
Hey,
Yes, sure.
This is the duplicated from the /en
http://www.spain-internship.com/en/home/149-all-en/placement-spain
Thanks!
-
Do you have a link to one of these pages so we can look at how it is deploying the canonical onto the page.
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
-
Crawl depth seems off?
I'm reviewing my site crawl data and am seeing some very strange things such as: The homepage URL has a listed crawl depth of 2. Pages that are featured in the main site navigation (which is present on all pages, including homepage) are ranking at a crawl depth of 3. What am I missing here? Shouldn't my homepage have a crawl depth of 0 or 1? Why would pages linked directly from my homepage have a crawl depth other than 1? (Single click from homepage to that page)? Thank you!
Link Explorer | | LianaLewis0 -
MOZ link explorer is not showing any result
Whenever I am searching in link explore, it is only showing the blanks with default zero value. It was showing data for my website 1 hour ago but now not showing. SYphSNw
Link Explorer | | gb.select4you3 -
Is there any study or detailed report on How Moz & Google calculates domain authority ?
I want to know, Is there any detailed report or study done by someone on the Domain authority calculations between Google & Moz. Mainly, I would like to know 1. How Google calculates Domain Authority and How Moz does ? 2. Is there any correlation in majority of the cases or both differs vastly ?
Link Explorer | | sssnee20 -
Moz Pro Tools Inbound Links
Is there a way to get a date of when a inbound link was created from a external website. And if so is there a way to add that to the Moz Pro tools reports on a csv file.
Link Explorer | | willakawillow221 -
Moz error with domain and page authority if no www in my domain
Hello, so our domain is website.com and we do not use www in our domain. Now moz shows our page authority as huge (website. Com) and domain authority very low. But our domain is our page that we rank. Is this due to the fact that we use no www and we rank our main index page? Am I correct? Thanks!
Link Explorer | | advertisingcloud0 -
Only two pages crawled
Hi community, I'm having trouble viewing data for all of our pages. Moz is only crawling two of our pages, and we have a lot more than that. Any suggestions? Thanks, Emily
Link Explorer | | SkuidEmily0 -
Why Moz Back links check tool is very Slow compared with other tools?
I've created a new website 50 days old with a vision of sharing high-quality content. I created some pages which are useful and helpful, what make other people link to my site. Early days, two weeks ago I've started checking my backlinks starting with Ahref and majestic. three days ago I decided to join Moz too and use Moz explorer. But, I discovered that Moz tool is too slow compared with other tools. Why? Starting with Ahref. They discovered more than 100 links and updating their data for my site as a new website every 6 hours as I know. Also majestic for the first time discovered six links then every two days they updating their data. Even Google discovered some of my backlinks. Specially links from high-quality sites such as Wikipedia with high-quality pages. Moz tool discovered zero of my backlinks even after subscribing. I don't think Moz need to discover websites like Wikipedia which already indexed by Moz. So, I wonder Why Moz tools are very very very slow like that? Update: (This is a question, not a discussion. So, please don't edit it) Can any Moz support answer please? Thanks.
Link Explorer | | Eslam-yosef0