New to Moz and wanted a bit of help with my report
-
Hi,
I have used the MOZ report to analyse one of my friends sites and I wanted to query a few warnings it highlighted and I just wanted people's thought on how important they thought these were:
The first is dupliate descriptions/titles. This is mainly down the e-commerce pages.
Fist duplicate content:
On some pages the description is identical and all that is different is the title and picture, is this an issue?Duplicate pages:
Due to the way the website folder structure/catergories has been created some pages are identical but because the product comes under 2 cetergories there is 2 seperate pages, should we use the canonical on one of the pages?Also regarding the canonical tag, they have put link rel="canonical" on every page and got it to point at itself, so not really being used in the way it is meant to be. Could something like this cause any harm?
The final thing is internal linking back to the homepage. If for example the homepage is http://www.test.com, when linking back is it best to put the full URL over "index.html" even though they are the same page?
Any help really appreciated
Dan
-
Since I don't know the exact nature of your duplicate pages, its a little hard to give a solid answer. Firstly, a canonical is a signal not a directive... so the search engines can choose to disregard it. Second, there are a few ways to consider handling duplicate page content. If your duplicate needs to exist for some reason and is a straight copy of another page or features a duplicate subset of content found on another page, then you could consider a canonical. If the duplicate page serves no real purpose and there is a better version of it elsewhere, then you could go with a 301. If the page needs to exist but could be re-written into something more relevant than its current state, do some tweaking to make it unique.
-
Great thanks. Just on this point, would it be better to use the canonicals tag to point at the other page or just slightly ammend one of the pages?
Duplicate pages:
Due to the way the website folder structure/catergories has been created some pages are identical but because the product comes under 2 cetergories there is 2 seperate pages, should we use the canonical on one of the pages? -
In reports, Canonicals are listed as a Notice not an error or a warning. Notices are just interesting facts about your site. So those aren't wrong. Many people have said that adding the canonical tag on a page pointing to itself is a good precautionary measure for if the page gets scraped.
As for http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/index.php ... They may look like the same page to you but they are not to the bots. You should choose 1 and redirect the other to it.
-
Also on point 2, in this situation would it not be best just to use a canonical tag pointing one of the pages at the other to avoid the duplicate content in Google's eyes?
-
Thanks for the reponse.
Regarding point 3:
When the website was initially made, the person making it has put this line on every page:
-
Daniel,
I like the tutorial information on the SEO Yoast web site. Their 101 section has a some great tutorials. I like their information on duplicate content: http://yoast.com/articles/duplicate-content/
Rel Canonical:http://yoast.com/wordpress/canonical/
Good luck!
Ron
-
- Yes, make sure description is different for each page
- So are there two pages in two different categories or one page being crawled twice? If it's two seperate pages in different categories I would change the title tag to something like 'Product X Category 1' and then 'Product X Category 2'. I would do the same thing with the description as well. If it's one page being crawled (possibly indexed twice) I would pick a category based on potential traffic and get rid of the 2nd category.
- Who's they? I'm not understanding this canonical question
- It should not make a difference whether you're using a full url or short url format.
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
-
New to Moz, need some probably basic answers about Keywords, Linking, Competitors and General SEO
Hi, So I have quite a lot of data colelcted about my site now, regarding keyword research, page crawling and competitor research ect. But I find myself second guessing myself about what I have done and what to do next. I have done basic research for as many relevant keywords I could think of to my site, including branded and non branded terms. If the main competitive keywords for my niche are very competitive, shall I start doing more research for long tail keywords and only try to rank for them? Does is matter how many keywords I am doing research for? Does is matter how many keywords I try to optimise for each webpage? Are the amount of branded keywords I am researching skewing my results? As they are all ranked #1, but nearly all of the non branded keywords are much further down the list... Once I have decided what keywords are worth trying to ranking for for each page, are the techniques to actually rank more highly for them - Title, H1 Tag, Description, Meta Data, Fresh Content and using the keywords on the page? Or are there more techniques I haven't heard of? Under Keyword Rankings - I noticded that some of my keywords are directing to specific pages, like "Cavity Waxes" is directing to the URL ending in .com/cavity-waxes - How do you assign the keywords im researching to specific URLs? - Or does Moz do it automatically? As most of my keywords seem to be unassigned to any URL, is that because they are not ranking highly enough? How do I best use the data collected through Moz? Good practices? Techniques? Tips and Tricks? What is the best practice for finding potential link partners and asking them for mutual linking? Techniques for finding partners that are likely to link with us, but still provides link juice. I must apologise for this long-winded set of questions, but these are troubling me! Any help would be greatly appreciated, Kind regards, Max Johnson
Moz Pro | | BiltHamber10 -
New pages on my web site
I have created web sites that appear somewhere on Google in hardly any time at all, but I appear to have forgotten something or things are different for pages added recently to an existing website. I have added a page on a particular subject, optimized it using on page grader, so that I get an A, and a check mark for everything except H1 tags and rel=canonical which my web hosting provider does not support. I do have a check mark for accessible to search engines The page has the format http://www.domain.com/specific-keyword It is in the menu, so should have internal links to it, as I understand it. I have created a new site map, and submitted it in webmaster tools. Interestingly it says that of the 96 pages only 76 were indexed is this a clue? and why would they not index a page I have then shared the page on google plus, facebook, tumblr, pinterest and twitter and some others In OSE it comes up as domain authority 28 page authority 1, the social media shares do show up in metrics on the right but no links internal or external are shown, they do on other pages I created in the same way. Is it just a case of waiting or is their something I do to help thank you
Moz Pro | | singingtelegramsuk0 -
White Label Version of Moz Pro?
I may have missed it, but is there a white label option for Moz Pro? I have a few clients that would like to login and have a look at competition, rankings, etc. Perhaps something like WebCEO or MySEOtool?
Moz Pro | | TysonDowns0 -
How do you explain this in this Keyword Difficulty Report?
Hello here, I am trying to understand how my site virtualsheetmusic.com can better compete for the keyword "sheet music download" where we used to be 3rd until a few months ago, and now we are at the 5th spot. But here is my specific question: I can't find an explanation why two of our competitors are ranked before us at the 3rd and 4th spot. Please, look at the attached image (very wide) which shows the Keyword Difficulty Report for this keyword. You can also download a PDF of it here below: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/keyword-sheet-music-download.pdf We are at the 5th spot, and the two competitors highlighted in pink are the ones I am talking about: I am trying to understand why they are ranking better than us, despite our metrics look much better than theirs. In fact, if I look at the metrics in the report, I can't find an explanation to justify their outrank against us, so there must be something else that the report is missing. Any thoughts about this issue are very welcome! Thank you in advance for any help. Sincerely,
Moz Pro | | fablau
Fabrizio [keyword-sheet music download.jpg](http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/keyword-sheet music download.jpg)0 -
My moz only one page was crawled
I recently moved my shopping cart from one provider to another and today moz only crawled one page, could this be because maybe google has not indexed it yet or should i be concerned? I pointed the DNS at the new cart monday night if that helps. I would have expected it to be indexed by now
Moz Pro | | SmartVapes0 -
Site explore reporting error over week
unable to dispaly anchor text error Doh! Roger is still working out the kinks with the new index and is having issues untangling anchor text data. We're currently showing anchor text data from the previous index, but we will update as soon as we can.
Moz Pro | | 1step2heaven120 -
Different Moz Scores Between Page and Subdomain
The Moz scores for a page-specific website:: www.website.com are different than the subdomain: www.website.com/. www.website.com: Page MozRank: 4.58
Moz Pro | | DanSpeicher
Page MozTrust: 4.9 www.website.com/ Subdomain MozRank: 5.21
Subdomain MozTrust 5.18 Does that have any significance? Should I be routing pages to the " / " version? Thanks, Daniel0