Duplicate Page and Title Issues
-
On the last crawl, we received errors for duplicate page titles and some duplicate content pages.
Here is the issue:
We went through our page titles that were marked as duplicate and changed them to make sure their titles were different. However, we just received a new crawl this week and it is saying there are even more duplicate page title errors detected than before. We're wondering if this is a problem with just us or if it has been happening to other Moz users.
As for the duplicate content pages, what is the best way to approach this and see what content is being looked at as a "duplicate" set?
-
I am being told I have hundreds of duplicate titles and content on my site. It's not possible. Not only do I only have 120ish posts on my site and they all have different titles, but google console shows me that no on on the web is claiming my posts as theirs (ie they are not saying they are the originals, etc.) So what the heck is the issue? Why am I being told that posts that are NOT duplicate of anything are duplicate content and that I have a bunch of duplicate titles when NONE OF MY titles are duplicates of any other title?????????
And, how can I have 400 pieces of duplicate content when I only have 120 blog posts??
Please someone help me with this
-
Always glad to help!
-
Thank you for your help!
-
Hi there!
I took a look at your campaign and it seems that we crawled a lot more page of the site this week in general than we did the previous week. Two weeks ago, we crawled about 500 pages and this week the crawl jumped up to 2800. So it isn't that there are more duplicate pages on your site now, it is just that we are able to crawl more pages now than we were before, which led to us finding even more duplicate pages that had not been reported before.
As for why we are crawling so many more pages, it could be for a few reasons. If you made changes to the links on your site, the page hierarchy of the site, or if you remove noindex tags or updated the robots.txt file for the site, those things could all affect how we are able to crawl the site.
I hope this helps! Please let me know if I can help you with anything else.
Chiaryn
Help Team Sensei -
Hey There!
I responded to your support request with more information on how we view canonicals. I hope it was helpful!
If you can send me examples of pages that you believe are being counted incorrectly, that will help me determine if there is an issue with the crawl or if the pages correctly fall into how we determine duplicates based on the canonical tags.
I look forward to hearing back from you there soon!
Chiaryn
Help Team Sensei -
They have different purposes, but all relating to preventing the same page from showing duplicate content because of the different ways a URL can be written. There is nothing on this page to show that using a canonical tag can take two different pages and remove the similar content. The purpose of the canonical tag is to set the preferred URL for one page.
-
The problem is, our content is unique to each page and post. Yet they still have been coming up duplicated. I'll have to try Netrepid's google searching suggestion to double check these.
-
I would remove the domain name when you use the query.
moz keyword research in the united states best practice gets a much different SERP than keyword research in the united states best practice.
If you are trying to get a pure SERP result than you shouldn't use your domain name. That will tell you if there are any other search results in the web. If you want to find duplicate content on your site use copyscape.com or go to GWT and look for internal duplicate content.
Again, not only copy creates a duplicate content message. It is having an off html to text ratio, repetitive links in the HTML with not enough copy to balance it out. If Moz is reading a duplicate content error, and the number is increasing week to week I wouldn't discredit the finding simply because you don't understand why the error is occurring. The canonical tag won't prevent two different URLs from showing duplicate content. If you want to do that, no follow one of the URLs. That isn't best practice though, best practice is to fix the copy.
-
Hey Monica... canonical tagging can be used for a lot more than just 'www' or non-www:
-
Yeh, the weird thing I am noticing is that the canonical tags are already present on this domain, and it's not picking up ALL of the pages with canonical as duplicates.
I'm not really sure what's going on, but when in doubt, I always Google the following query:
site:domain intext:block of text unique to that page
If there is a duplicate content issue, Google should tell you that by showing more than one result. If it shows only one, then Google is reading your code right.
I know we all love Moz and want them to show we have no errors on our sites, but at the end of the day... don't we really want Google to find no issues with our sites, not Moz?
-
Canonical tags just point non www URL address to www addresses. It tells the engines that whether or not the WWW is used, the two URLs are the same page. It will only solve the duplicate content errors if that is in fact what is causing the error. If the actual cause is duplicate content the only way to solve it is to write unique copy.
-
Thank you for that information!
-
No Magento. We were debating the use of Canonical tags ourself.
-
I'm noticing a similar issue for an online store I consult for. We added canonical tags to all product pages and category pages, and Moz doesn't appear to be correctly attributing them.
Are you using a Magento store by chance?
-
Depending on when you made the changes, it could just be that they weren't fixed in time for the next crawl. Fixing these duplicate titles are really important for your SEO.
Open the medium priority issues and set it to duplicate page titles only. When you do that you will see which titles are duplicate. Sometimes there are more than one duplicate title so make sure you completely expand each line. I would make sure I go back into all of them and see if what is showing as duplicate on the crawl report is still the same information on your title tags. If it matches, then those pages need to be changed. If the titles are different, then wait another week and just see if the timing was off somehow.
If you have pages with duplicate content there could be a few things triggering it. There could be a too much of the same HTML and not enough text to make the pages look different. The content on the pages could be very thin, and very similar. The best way to offset duplicate page errors on your site is to get original, informative, unique content on those pages. You can set your crawl report to high priority errors, then select duplicate page content. You can then look at all of the duplicate pages side by side to determine if you can get unique content on those pages. If you are getting duplicate page errors for the same web page, one with a WWW and one without, then check to make sure your REL Canonical tags are in place and functioning properly. If the pages are different then you need to get great content up.
-
Hi there,
See here - I think Moz Analytics/PRO don't process rel=prev/next properly, so they may give false alarms on those pages, even if the titles are properly implemented.
Cheers
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
-
Site Crawl 1-page 301 status error but httpstatus.io says its 403
I am trying to run a site crawl for my website and MOZ is only resulting in 1 page crawled with the home page URL Status Code of 301. However when I run it in httpstatus.io it is giving me a 403 status error. Im curious as to why MOZ is saying its a 301 and httpstatus.io is saying 403. Is there anything I can do in MOZ first to get the site crawled before asking my developers to look into the 403 error?
Moz Bar | | JohnConover0 -
Why do new issues occur when there have been no updates to the website?
I am unsure on how new issues are created when crawling the site from one crawl to the next. I had assumed the number of issues would remain static if nothing was done from one crawl to the next. Can someone explain how new/additional issues are added from each crawl, even without updates being made? Thanks in advance, Christopher
Moz Bar | | debb0 -
Moz Crawler Causing Server Timeouts... Crawling thousands of non-existant pages with query parameters
Moz crawler is crawling all pages like this: http://www.xxxx.com/?product_count=100&product_order=desc&product_orderby=date http://www.xxxx.com/?product_count=100&product_order=desc&paged=1 http://www.xxx.com/?product_count=100&product_order=desc&product_view=grid Last month it crawled 80,000 pages on a site with less than 100 pages. Is there a way to select only certain pages to be crawled? Right now it is still crawling this site, since Monday morning and it's Tuesday mid-day. Every Monday it is causing time-outs from high band width on our server. Just getting ready to delete this client from the account unless there is a solution someone can give us. Thanks.
Moz Bar | | adirondack0 -
Page title not being read
Hi all I have been testing my site with the Moz on page grader recently and every page seems to come up with the same issues. The keyword doesn't seem to be in the title tag or the title tag isn't there. Could anyone tell me why this is? This is an example of a page it is happening on https://www.sbat.com/tips/todays-free-horse-racing-tips I used several versions of the Keyword including free horse Racing tips Horse racing tips and it seemed none of these were picked up.
Moz Bar | | gillies88880 -
On-Page Grader fails?
I have optimized the following page for the norwegian word "Dusjkabinett": https://www.vvskupp.no/Produkter/Baderom/Dusjkabinett The On-Page grader gives the URL an F-grade. BUT as you can see it seems like the tool fails in giving a correct report. See attachment. Can anybody help me understand? pCyEYaWd3
Moz Bar | | moggiew0 -
Perplexed by last MOZ crawling duplicate content errors
In the last crawler issues report from MOZ I can see many many pages listed as duplicate content with 0 duplicate urls. Like this: http://imgur.com/fbikRVq I am puzzled, what does it mean?
Moz Bar | | max.favilli0 -
Can't delete items from the on page grader
I check every single box and they don't delete. This is driving me nuts. Please can you delete them for me because I am not impressed with this AT ALL. In fact I am getting so cross I am in danger of screaming hysterically which might get me the sack and it would be all your fault. That was slightly tongue in cheek, but please can you fix it please. please.
Moz Bar | | CommT0 -
How can the Moz Page Grader support a 'keyword portfolio' approach?
I used to use the Page Grader tools to support the old philosophy of one page - one keyword. With more focus now being given to a portfolio of keywords around a topic area - what would be a good approach to using the page grader tool? Obviously getting A's and B's is impossible for multiple keywords. The only way i've seen suggested in moz tools to help with keyword portfolios is to use labels in the ranking measurement and then find averages of the results. Are there other strategies that I can try?
Moz Bar | | AISFM0