Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors

[marcodublin]

Hi,

I'm new to SeoMoz and to this forum. I've started a new campaign on my site and got back loads of error.

Most of them are Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors. I know I have some duplicate titles but I don't have any duplicate content.

I'm not a web developer and not so expert but I have the impression that the crawler is following all my internal links (Infact I have also plenty of warnings saying "Too many on-page links".

Do you think this is the cause of my errors? Should I implement the nofollow on all internal links? I'm working with Joomla.

Thanks a lot for your help

Marco

[A_Q]

Hi Marco,

It seems to me like you need to implement the canonical tag.

Site crawlers/bots will consider the following pages as different pages because of their URL and thus tell indicate to them that the content is duplicated on each page...

www.site.com/

www.site.com/index.html

By implementing the following tag on each of your sites pages (changing the URL for each page) you will tell the crawler which page they should be indexing and to ignore the other.

Here's an example of a canonical tag (to be placed within the head tag of the page)

I think this will sort out your duplication issues.

You can find more information about canonical URLs here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

I hope this helps!

Elias

[marcodublin]

Hi Elias,

thanks a lot for your reply. I've read few posts about the canonical tag and Yes I'm going to try it.

Just couple of things:

1. Let's say I have 4 duplicate for one page, I presume I have to add the tag in the head of only one page right? Does it make any difference which one I pick?

2. Any idea on how this can be implemented in Joomla?It doesn't seem to be very straightforward.

Thanks a lot

Marco

[UnderRugSwept]

www.site.com/ and www.site.com/index.html, site.com/index.html/, ect, are already the same page. So, there's only one page TO put the tag on. You're just telling the crawlers that you only want one of them to get the credit, and which version of the page you prefer to be displayed.

[A_Q]

Hi Marco, as Marissa says - by putting the canonical tag on one page you are putting it on all of them as they are in fact the same page - they are just reached by different URLs.

[marcodublin]

Hi Elias, Hi Marisa,

thanks you both

you are right, in the meantime I had done this but I have the impression it is not working and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

I'm attaching a link to a page of my site (I hope I can do this). Please have a look at the code, you will see the tag rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/gargano/isole-tremiti.html”/> which is indicating the URL I want to use. However SeoMoz is still giving me the error. And this is happening for both the Italian and English version.

So far I've only added the tag to this page, I want to find the solution before modifying all pages currently affected.

http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/linea-costiera/isole-tremiti.html

Thanks a lot again

[A_Q]

It looks fine to me. You will need to do the same on all of your pages.

If you've just added the code you will need to wait up to a week for SEOmoz to re-crawl your website depending on when you're site crawl is scheduled.

Let me know how you get on.

Elias

[VIPvillasdotcom]

Elias,

I too have 'thousands' of duplicated errors in SEOmoz. Most of which are because it is returning

/abc.com as a different page to /ABC.com

Surely Google doesn't do that? Just because one URL is in capital and the other small case? I also have no idea where SEOmoz is picking that up from......possibly links internal to the page with the hyperlink using different case?

It seems to me this is too sensitive and for me to fix that would take WEEKS!!!! I fail to see if there would be any uplift if Google sees beyond that issue as its cosmetic and not functional.

Regards

Andy

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Marco,

I took a look at your page at http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/linea-costiera/isole-tremiti.html

Looks like you've got the canonical in place okay here. The next step is to add the canonical on every page that is a duplicate of this page. And you want to make sure to point to the right page. Let me be clear: Every page that is a duplicate of this page should have the same canonical. In this case:

  <link rel=”canonical” href=[”http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/gargano/isole-tremiti.html”/](view-source:http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/linea-costiera/%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/gargano/isole-tremiti.html%E2%80%9D/)>

You can find the other pages you need to add this tag to in your SEOmoz report. In each duplicated content report, it will list the number of other pages that are duplicates. Simply click on the number to see the URLs.

I'm not a Joomla expert, but webmasters I've talked to have expressed that other platforms such as Wordpress and Drupal are much more accommodating of these types of fixes. There are some various plugin modules you can use, but you'll have to select one appropriate to your configuration.

Here's a good resource from Dr. Pete: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Hope this helps. Best of luck.