My canonical tags all appear to be in place. Why does SEOmoz keep telling me I have duplicate titles and page content?

[tbenson79]

This post is deleted!

[DougRoberts]

Maybe I've missed something, but looking at the two pages you listed:

• http://www.bikerackshops.com/vehicle_racks/trunk_mounted_bike_racks/passage_xt_2_bike/
• http://www.bikerackshops.com/passage_xt_2_bike/

You say, "The developers have assured me that the canonical tags are working properly" but I can't see any rel="canonical" link elements in the source.

[tbenson79]

This post is deleted!

[KeriMorgret]

Right now, SEOmoz will still list those pages as duplicates, even though the canonical tag may be in place and working correctly. Hope that helps one of your worries!

[DougRoberts]

Ok, this doesn't look so bad. It looks as if the canonicals are set correctly on this second example (don't got off on one at your developers just yet!). As you say, the bottom three all point to the top one as the canonical version. This is the version that should appear in the SERPS.

As far as the SEOmoz crawl reports go, not that setting a canonical won't stop these pages being reported as duplicate content.

From the help:

"Keep in mind that that canonicals will stop the pages from ranking against each other, but they will still show up as duplicate content from a UI perspective, so we will still count them as duplicate."

I don't know if the first example is an exception or not, it would be worth checking to make sure and have confidence that the canonicals are being set where they need to.

I do notice that different product have the same content. Take a look at these two product pages:

http://www.bikerackshops.com/passage_xt_3_bi/

http://www.bikerackshops.com/passage_xt_2_bike/

You see how the product descriptions are the same? If you do a search for some text from one of these for example do a google search for:

"Even when a buckle slips out of your hands, you don’t have to worry about it dinging your bike or vehicle."

You'll notice that only one of these pages appears with an option to repeat the search with ommited results included

Getting specific product pages to rank is hard, individual product pages don't do a great job attracting links, but I notice you've got a resource centre with some richer content, but it does appear that you're up against some pretty strong competition! Good luck!

[tbenson79]

Thank you for all of your help Doug. Yes, we are in a very competitive market, and up until Penguin, we were ranking very well on most of our key terms. SEO is now in my hands and I'm just trying to make sure we have the basics right before moving forward with anything else.

It looks like I need to contact the developers in regards the duplicate titles and descriptions detected by Webmaster Tools.

Thank you again for your help.

[tbenson79]

Thank you Keri. One worry down, unlimited to go. . .