Crawl Errors for duplicate titles/content when canonicalised or noindexed

[Fergus_Macdonald]

Hi there,

I run an ecommerce store and we've recently started changing the way we handle pagination links and canonical links.

We run Magento, so each category eg /shoes has a number of parameters and pages depending on the number of products in the category.

For example /shoes?mode=grid will display products in grid view, /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 is page 2 in grid mode.

Previously, all URL variations per category were canonicalised to /shoes.

Now, we've been advised to paginate the base URLs with page number only. So /shoes has a pagination next link to /shoes?p=2, page 2 has a prev link to /shoes and a next link to /shoes?p=3.

When any other parameter is introduced (such as mode=grid) we canonicalise that back to the main category URL of /shoes and put a noindex meta tag on the page.

However, SEOMoz is picking up duplicate title warnings for urls like /shoes?p=2 and /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 despite the latter being canonicalised and having a noindex tag. Presumably search engines will look at the canonical and the noindex tag so this shouldn't be an issue.

Is that correct, or should I be concerned by these errors?

Thanks.

[eTundra]

Good question - I have a similar situation on my site and I also get the duplicate page title warning in SEOMoz campaigns.  Up until this point I have not worried too much about the warnings because I do have the canonical tag in place and Google is indexing the correct page and leaving the copies out.

I would like to hear what others have to say about this though.

[EricaMcGillivray]

If you canonicalized the pages correct and added pagination clearly, I wouldn't worry about the errors in crawl. I know one of the most requested features for our crawl errors is the ability to ignore some of the errors. Make sure your voice is added in our request a feature.

For canonicalization and pagination:

The best thing to do is have a "view all" page and rel=canonical to that page from your series pages.  However, if you don't have a view all page, then you can put these nifty rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in to let Google know your page has pagination and where the next and previous pages are.