Duplicate Site Content found in Moz; Have a URL Parameter set in Google Webmaster Tools

[MitchellChapman]

Hey,

So on our site we have a Buyer's Guide that we made. Essentially it is a pop-up with a series of questions that then recommends a product. The parameter ?openguide=true can be used on any url on our site to pull this buyer's guide up. Somehow the Moz Site Crawl reported each one of our pages as duplicate content as it added this string (?openguide=true) to each page.

We already have a URL Parameter set in Google Webmaster Tools as openguide ; however, I am now worried that google might be seeing this duplicate content as well. I have checked all of the pages with duplicate title tags in the Webmaster Tools to see if that could give me an answer as to whether it is detecting duplicate content. I did not find any duplicate title tag pages that were because of the openguide parameter.

I am just wondering if anyone knows:
1. a way to check if google is seeing it as duplicate content
2.  make sure that the parameter is set correctly in webmaster tools
3. or a better way to prevent the crawler from thinking this is duplicate content

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks,

Mitchell Chapman
www.kontrolfreek.com

[MitchellChapman]

Hey Paul,

Thanks for the response! Our site is an ecommerce site through Magento. I though we had all of the canonicalization set up correctly since we followed this article: https://mza.bundledseo.com/ugc/setting-up-magento-for-the-search-engines

I was under the impression that the canonicalization was encompassed in the Auto-direct to base url setting. But there is also a setting under Search Engine Optimization to enable canonical link meta tag for categories and products. Both are set to yes. Any idea why the canonical tags might not be working? Also, how can we implement the canonical tag in magento for the homepage?

[ThompsonPaul]

The Moz crawler has no access to what you might have set in Search Console, so it can't make use of that info, Mitchell. In addition, the other search engines will have the same problem.

Fortunately, there is a mechanism specifically built for this situation that works for pretty much all search crawlers. It's the canonical tag. By adding a self referential canonical tag in the header of every page, you're telling search engines that any version of the URL that has a variable in it should be considered the same as the main (canonical) URL and pass all it's influence to the canonical URL as well. Poof - dupe content issue resolved.

Self-referential just means that the page's canonical tag uses its own "clean" URL. That way, even if a search engine crawls the version with the variable, the page header will still point to the clean version.

Your site has an additional significant canonicalisation problem. It currently can be reached and indexed under both http://www.kontrolfreek.com and also the https version at https://www.kontrolfreek.com. Search engines consider these separate sites, so you're splitting your domain authority.

Get the 301 redirects in place so that all non-https pages and resources are redirected to their https versions, then use the https URL version for the canonical tags in each page header. (It's essential that static resources like images/CSS/JavaScript etc are also using the https URLs, otherwise browsers will indicate security problems on the page as you currently have even with your https URLs)

Hope that all makes sense? If not, holler.

Paul