GWT and html improvements

[PremioOscar]

Hi all

I am dealing with duplicate content issues on webmaster tool but I still don't understand what's happening as the number of issues keeps changing. Last week the duplicate meta description were 232, then went down to 170 now they are back to 218.

Same story for duplicate meta title, 110, then 70 now 114. These ups and downs have been going on for a while and in the past two weeks I stopped changing things to see what would have happened.

Also the issues reported on GWT are different from the ones shown in the Crawl Diagnostic on Moz.

Furthermore,  most URL's have been changed (more than a year ago) and 301 redirects have been implemented but Google doesn't seem to recognize them.

Could anyone help me with this?

Also can you suggest a tool to check redirects?

Cheers

Oscar

[PremioOscar]

Thank you guys for your answers, I will look into it, and try to solve the problems.

I think many pages are self canonicalized, but I see that many URL's haven't been redirect to the new ones so I will start fixing the redirects.

In the top pages report though shows just the new URL's.

Anyway, I will keep you update on this as I am not too sure how to tackle this.

Thanks a lot.

Cheers

[RobMay]

Had a few minutes and wanted to help out...

Google doesn't always index/crawl the same # of pages week over week, so this could be the cause of your indexing/report problem with regards to the differences you are seeing. As well, if you are working on the site and making changes, you should be seeing these numbers improve (depending on site size of course Enterprise sites might take more time to go through and fix up, so these numbers might look like they are staying at the same rate - if your site is huge

To help with your 301 issue - I would definitely look up and download SEO Screaming Frog. It's a great tool to use to identify potential problems on the site. Very easy to download and use. Might take some getting used too, but the learning curve isn't very hard. Once you use it a few times to help diagnose problems, or see things you are working on improve through multiple crawling. It will allow you to see some other things that might not be working and get to planning fixes there too

As well, make sure to review your .htaccess file and how you have written up your 301's. If you are using Apache, this is a great resource to help you along. Read that 301 related article here

Make sure to manually check all 301 redirects using the data/URL's from the SEO Screaming Frog tool. Type them in and visually see if you get redirected to the new page/URL. If you do, it's working correctly, and I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before Google fixes their index and displays the right URL or 301. You can also check this tool for verifying your 301 redirects using the old URL and see how it performs (here)

Hope some of this helps to get you off to working/testing and fixing! Keep me posted if you are having trouble or need someone to run a few tests from another location.

Cheers!

[CleverPhD]

We had the same issue on one of our sites.   Here is how I understand it after looking into it and talking to some other SEOs.

The duplicate content Title and Meta description seem to lag any 301 redirects or canonicals that you might implement.  We went through a massive site update and had 301s in place for over a year with still "duplicates" showing up in GWT for old and new URLs.  Just to be clear, we had the old URLs 301ing to the new ones for over a year.

What we found too, was that if you look into GWT under the top landing pages, we would have old URLs listed there too.

The solution was to put self canonicalizing links on all pages that were not canonicaled to another one.  This cleaned thing up over the next month or so.  I had checked my 301 redirects.  I removed all links to old content on my site, etc.

What is still find are a few more "duplicates" in GWT.  This happens on two types of URLs

1. We have to change a URL for some reason - we put in the 301.  It takes a while for Google to pick that up and apply it to the duplicate content report.  This is even when we see it update in the index pretty quick.  As, I said, the duplicate report seems to lag other reports.

2. We still have some very old URLs that it has taken Google a while to "circle back" and check them, see the 301 and the self canonical and fix.

I am honestly flabbergasted at how Google is so slow about this and surprised.  I have talked with a bunch of people just to make sure we are not doing anything wrong with our 301s etc.  So, while I understand what is happening, and see it improving, I still dont have a good "why" this happens when technically, I have everything straight (as far as I know).  The self canonical was the solution, but it seems that a 301 should be enough.    I know there are still old links to old content out there, that is the one thing I cannot update, but not sure why.

It is almost like Google has an old sitemap it keeps crawling, but again, I have that cleared out in Google as well

If you double check all your stuff and if you find anything new, I would love to know!

Cheers!