Duplicate Content Mystery
-
Hi Moz community!
I have an ongoing duplicate mystery going on here and I'm hoping someone here can answer my question.
We have an Ecommerce site that has a variety of product pages and category pages. There are Rel canonicals in place, along with parameters in GWT, and there are also URL rewrites.
Here are some scenarios, maybe you can give insight as to what’s exactly going on and how to fix it.
All the duplicates look to be coming from category pages specifically.
For example:
This link re-writes:To:
http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html
The rel canonical tag looks like this:
http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves.html" />
The CONTENT is different, but the URLs are the same. It thinks that the product category view is the same as the all products view, even though there is a canonical in there telling it which one is the original. Some of them don’t have anything to do with each other.
Take a look:
Link identified as duplicate:
Link this is a duplicate of:
http://www.incipio.com/cases/macbook-cases/macbook-pro-13in-cases.html
Any idea as to what could be happening here?
-
Hi Ishwar,
If you have done so yet it would be best to create your own post. Many people pop in here to help others and when they see this topic as answered they may not look at it. Creating your own post will get the most attention.
-
Hi Nicole,
Okay so the reason I stated that it appears something is improperly installed is due to the fact a page should in general have 1 head tag, 1 title tag, 1 body tag and 1 document type declaration. Your page has the normal ones you'd expect to see plus another set.
In the code I posted above you have an Iframe, which is basically a tag that says display information from a different source. In this case it is Google, which is fine but it should not contain another set of head, title, and body tags along with a document declaration. Google would never do that. This along with my years of experience looking at and installing ad-ons leads me to believe that something was installed incorrectly or at the very least not coded correctly.
As to the misconfiguration issue, I would look first at how my url rewrites are being done as there is no viable reason the first link you posted should rewrite to a url and serve different content than what is suppose to be there. That tells me that the re-writes are being incorrectly handled.
I hope that helps a little,
Don
-
Hello Moz Communtiy!
i am also having error of Duplicate Tag Content Mystery like:
http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/blog-post/
http://www.earnmoneywithgoogleadsense.com/tag/effective-blog-post/
Pages are same. I have 100+ Error on website so how can i remove this error? DO you have any tutorial based on this?
Can i change canonical url at once or i need to set it one by one
-
Hi Donford,
Thanks so much for getting back to me. Great answer! I'd like some clarification here. I did not configure this and if I'm going to talk to the developer, I'd like to have more knowledge to speak to it.
Could you please clarify what you mean when you say:
- It looks like something is installed and configured improperly.
- You have 2 head tags on the page that shows up from the redirect.
- This is actually inside the first head tag complete with a body tag and another doc declaration.
I looked at the example you sent, but I'm not sure what I'm looking at. If you could explain those bullet points in more detail, it would greatly help.
You're the best!
Thanks,
Nicole
-
It looks like something is installed and configured improperly.
You have 2 head tags on the page that shows up from the redirect.
This is actually inside the first head tag complete with a body tag and another doc declaration.
<iframe id="oauth2relay579972146" name="oauth2relay579972146" src="https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/postmessageRelay?parent=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.incipio.com#rpctoken=728288212&forcesecure=1" style="width: 1px; height: 1px; position: absolute; top: -100px;" tabindex="-1">
<html><head><title>title><meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type"><meta content="IE=edge" http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible"><meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=0" name="viewport"><script src="https://apis.google.com/js/api.js" type="text/javascript" gapi_processed="true"><script src="https://oauth.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/js/core:rpc:shindig.random:shindig.sha1.js?c=2" type="text/javascript"><script src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/accounts/o/3417060037-postmessagerelay.js">head><body>html>iframe>
That looks like an installation issue.
-
Now the misconfiguration issue would have to be why the URL re-writes to page but serves up different content.
-
And lastly I think even if you fix those issues you're still going to get duplicate content warnings because you have very thin content on pages.
-
Example: Page 1 http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves/amazon-kindle-fire-hd-6-cases.html
-
Example: Page 2 http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves/amazon-kindle-fire-hd-7-cases.html
-
On those 2 pages there is a 1 character difference 6 instead of 7. All the other content (header & footer) and 1 letter difference. Than if you go to the actual product page you have the exact same issue same description to the letter except the one number. Yep, you're going to have a duplicate content problem.
-
This is something that all e-commerce stores face. You honestly need to write unique content for each and every product you sell. Don't copy & paste stuff from another site like Amazon or the manufacturers site, write your own content.
-
In summation, I would recheck any modules/ad-ons/plug-ins you installed as one appears to be incorrect. if that doesn't' fix the re-write issue have a developer that is familiar with your ecommerce platform look at this issue. Lastly, you got to have unique content.
-
Maybe not the best news but I hope it helps
-
Don
Edit in bullet points to try and make the post a look a little better. These forums don't take kindly to adding code blocks
-
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
-
Recurring events and duplicate content
Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | | megan.helmer0 -
When is Duplicate Content Duplicate Content
Hi, I was wondering exactly when duplicate content is duplicate content? Is it always when it is word-for-word or if it is similar? For example, we currently have an information page and I would like to add a FAQ to the website. There is, however, a crossover with the content and some of it is repeated. However, it is not written word for word. Could you please advise me? Thanks a lot Tom
Technical SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Duplicate page/Title content - Where?
Hi, I have just run a crawl on a new clients site, and there is several 'duplicate page content' and 'Duplicate Page Title'' issues. But I cannot find any duplicate content. And to make matters worse. The actual report has confused me. Just for example the about us page is showing in both reports and for both under 'Other URLs' it is showing 1? Why? Does this mean there is 1 other page with duplicate page title? or duplicate page content? Where are the pages that have the duplicate page titles, or duplicate page content? I have run scans using other software and a copyscape scan. And apart from missing page titles, I cannot find any page that has duplicate titles or content. I can find % percentages of pages with similar/same page titles/content. But this is only partial and contextually correct. So I understand that SEO Moz may pick percentage of content, which is fine, and therefore note that there is duplicate content/page titles. But I cannot seem to figure out where I would the source of the duplicate content/page titles. As there is only 1 listed in both reports for 'Other URLs' Hopefully my long question, has not confused. many thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | wood1e20 -
Avoiding duplicate content on internal pages
Lets say I'm working on a decorators website and they offer a list of residential and commercial services, some of which fall into both categories. For example "Internal Decorating" would have a page under both Residential and Commercial, and probably even a 3rd general category of Services too. The content inside the multiple instances of a given page (i.e. Internal Decorating) at best is going to be very similar if not identical in some instances. I'm just a bit concerned that having 3 "Internal Decorating" pages could be detrimental to the website's overall SEO?
Technical SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
How do I get rid of duplicate content
I have a site that is new but I managed to get it to page one. Now when I scan it on SEO Moz I see that I have duplicate content. Ex: www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/index and www.mysite.com/ How do I fix this without jeopardizing my SERPS ranking? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | bronxpad0 -
SEO with duplicate content for 3 geographies
The client would like us to do seo for these 3 sites http://www.cablecalc.com/ http://www.solutionselectrical.com.au http://www.calculatecablesizes.co.uk/ The sites have to targetted in US, Australia, and UK resoectively .All the above sites have identical content. Will Google penalise the sites ? Shall we change the content completly ? How do we approach this issue ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | | RiseSEO0 -
The Bible and Duplicate Content
We have our complete set of scriptures online, including the Bible at http://lds.org/scriptures. Users can browse to any of the volumes of scriptures. We've improved the user experience by allowing users to link to specific verses in context which will scroll to and highlight the linked verse. However, this creates a significant amount of duplicate content. For example, these links: http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5-10 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1 All of those will link to the same chapter in the book of James, yet the first two will highlight the verse 5 and verses 5-10 respectively. This is a good user experience because in other sections of our site and on blogs throughout the world webmasters link to specific verses so the reader can see the verse in context of the rest of the chapter. Another bible site has separate html pages for each verse individually and tends to outrank us because of this (and possibly some other reasons) for long tail chapter/verse queries. However, our tests indicated that the current version is preferred by users. We have a sitemap ready to publish which includes a URL for every chapter/verse. We hope this will improve indexing of some of the more popular verses. However, Googlebot is going to see some duplicate content as it crawls that sitemap! So the question is: is the sitemap a good idea realizing that we can't revert back to including each chapter/verse on its own unique page? We are also going to recommend that we create unique titles for each of the verses and pass a portion of the text from the verse into the meta description. Will this perhaps be enough to satisfy Googlebot that the pages are in fact unique? They certainly are from a user perspective. Thanks all for taking the time!
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0