SEOMoz says i have errors but goole webmaster doesnt show them - which one is right ?

[cassi]

I have about  350 websites all created in farcry 4.0 cms platform. When i do a site crawl using any seo tool ( seomoz, raven, screaming frog) it comes back telling me I have duplicate titles, description and content for a bunch of my pages. The pages are the same page its just that the crawl is showing the object Id and the friendly URL which is autocreated in the CMS as different pages.

EXAMPLE these are the samge page but are recognised as different in SEOMOZ crawl test and therefore flagged as having duplicate title tags and content ...

<colgroup span="1"><col style="width: 488pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 23771;" span="1" width="650"></colgroup>
|

www.westendautos.com.au/go/latest-news-and-specials

<colgroup span="1"><col style="width: 488pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 23771;" span="1" width="650"></colgroup>
| www.westendautos.com.au/index.cfm?objectid=9CF82BBD-9B98-B545-33BC644C0FA74C8E |

|

GOOGLE WEBMASTER  however does not show me these errors ? It shows no errors at all.

Now i believe i can fix this by chucking in a rel=canonical at the top of  each page ? (a big job over 350 sites) But even so  - my problem is that the website developers are telling me that SEOMOZ and all the other tools are wrong - that google will see these the way it should, that the object ID's would not get indexed ( although i have seen at least one object id show up in the serps.)

Do i believe the developers and trust that google has it sorted or go through the process of hassling the developers to get a rel=canonical added to all the pages?

(the issue sees my homepage as about 4 different pages www.domain.com/   www.domain.com/home   /index AND object id.

[EGOL]

...my problem is that the website developers are telling me that SEOMOZ and all the other tools are wrong...

Trust developers/designers for making things look good - if you like their style.... but when it comes to SEO you need to have your head examined if you are going to listen to your developer instead of trusting SEOmoz.

Here's something every professional SEO knows.... developers/designers generate a lot of business for SEOs (and lose a lot of money for webmasters) because they don't understand search engines, change all of your URLs, hide text because it stinks up their design, want to make your entire site in images, create navigation bars that spiders can't crawl, allow session id's to generate duplicate content and suck up all of your linkjuice.... I could go on and on here... You must be very careful and watch what they are doing - closely.

Do i believe the developers and trust that google has it sorted or go through the process of hassling the developers to get a rel=canonical added to all the pages?

lol.... I don't think that "hassling" is a very good word.  I would either be kicking their asses or firing them and getting a different developer who understand who owns the website!!!

Sometimes you have to assert yourself when somebody is going to screw up one of your websites. If they were trashing one of my good sites I would exert my authority as owner of the site.  If it is a choice between my site and their opinion... they lose swiftly.

Now i believe i can fix this by chucking in a rel=canonical at the top of  each page ?

Great, you know what to do.

[Superb]

No big deal, these URLs can be generated if you are using a non SEO friendly CMS. This happens to me when I was using Joomla (Joomla is not bad but It didn’t worked out well for me!).

The simple solution to this is download the CSV from screaming frog and go to these pages and set rel=canonical to the page so that Google if crawling, knows what page contains the original data that crawlers should be looking for.

On the other hand it’s a good idea to look in to some good SEO friendly CMS.

[seoninja20]

I agree with you about Joomla, It is awful in my experience for creating duplicate content issues.

[gmk1567]

No tool is 100% accurate in the SEO world.

If Google webmaster tool doesn't detect any error today that doesn't mean there is no error at all.

rel=canonical is a perfect solution and go for it.

[AlanMosley]

As one assuie to anouther, your deveopers are just not up to it.

I scaned your site, with software from bing that sees the exact same violations as bing.
and for a small site it has a lot of issues.
here is the same error SEOMoz found

The page with URL "http://www.westendautos.com.au/index.cfm?objectid=9CF82BBD-9B98-B545-33BC644C0FA74C8E" can also be accessed by using URL "http://www.westendautos.com.au/go/latest-news-and-specials".
Search engines identify unique pages by using URLs.  When a single page can be accessed by using any one of multiple URLs, a search engine assumes that there are multiple unique pages. Use a single URL to reference a page to prevent dilution of page relevance. You can prevent dilution by following a standard URL format.

more on teh error http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-canonical-formats

You problems go deeper still, you have domain name canonical issues, this is a big one and a obvious one your developers should of not let get by

if your site can be resched by www and non www without 301 redirecting the SE will see the sites as 2 seperate sites, and you rank will be split

I would also like to ask why you have 350 sites, are you saying they are duplicates of this one www.westendautos.com.au

[AlanMosley]

No CMS is perfect, but you can cetainly build a site free from any of these issues, i get a perfect score on every site i build using teh Bing SEO Toolkit, wich finds ever viollation that bing finds.

[EGOL]

I would also like to ask why you have 350 sites,

I was going to ask that too but didn't want to seem like a wise guy if the OP has 700 people workin' on 'em.

[AlanMosley]

I did find out, his web sites are a chain of auto shops called Repco here in australia

[cassi]

I have 350 franchise type businesses. Independant but have the marketing etc done for them I inhertied them this way. I am adressing the www to non www canonical issue seperately to this 'friendly url + objectID" canoncal  issue. Yes all 350 of them were pretty much duplicates and i am slowly working towards them all being fixed and individualised. I know I can fix it by putting in a rel=canonical but I am looking for some support so that when i  go back to the developers they cant just fob me o with some excuse that i dont understand. I have a real hard time to get some of these pages to rank and i sincerely beleive that it is no in my content ( which is in my control ) but coding errors which are holding some of them back ( which is somewhat out of my control) i had to push just to be able to write a page title that wasnt automatically used as the paragraph heading on the page 0_o

Oh and i have addressed the domain canonical via webmaster, which obviously doesnt solve ii for bing - but thanks to the awesome tutorial on your site http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issue  I know what i have to ask the developers for

now ! I do have access to the IIS but with onlylimited knowledge about the whole set up I am afraid of screwing something up - but that shows that with the right plugin it EASY to fix !! thank you so much !!

[AlanMosley]

I had a think about what your developers said about not erring in Google WMT, and I there is some truth in that as I assume they have exclude the parameters in WMT. But this is the poor mans way of fixing such things. You need to do this at the source for all search engines.
That was probably the most urgent problem the site had, but all up I found 345 violations all up.
If you want me to send you a detailed report email me mosley@thatsit.net.au if you want any help with IIS I can give you some help.

[cassi]

No i have the webmaster access and its not done there. 345 ??? wow is that coding stuff ?