SEO Mox reporting all pages & titles as duplicate, but this is not the case.

[RichardB2]

HI, I am confused . This week SEOMoz is reporting that all my pages and pages titles are duplicate. This is not the case. I have added geo meta tags to each page - could this be causing the duplicate page content condition? I have no theory about the title duplicate condition. I have uploaded pdfs of these seomoz reports here: http://www.2shared.com/document/JAgS2Ni9/Issue_-_Duplicate_Page_Content.html http://www.2shared.com/document/gyXcMsoP/Issue_-_Duplicate_Page_Title_-.html Help please. thanks.

[ThompsonPaul]

As near as I can tell, Richard, the crawl is reporting the issue because you don't have canonicalization of the primary domain of the website. Big words to mean that your site is resolving at both www.weddingdancelessons.com.au and weddingdancelessons.com.au (without the www)

Search Engines and therefore Mozbot will see these as two different sets of pagesx, therefore duplicating each other.

If you look down the list of pages reported, you'll see that some are listed with the www and some without.

What should happen is that one of those two versions is 301-redirected to the other. Best practice is usually to redirect the non-www to the www version, although it can be worth double-checking which version has more incoming links/page authority before making the final choice.

Since this looks like it's just happened, it may be that there have been changes made to the .htaccess file that have messed up previous settings, or it may be that the crawler just caught the dupes this time.

Paul

[Zachary_Russell]

Hello Richard, I just ran your site through a tool called screaming frog, which instantly crawls your site and allows me to view errors such as duplicate titles and the like. Here is what happened, when Screaming Frog, and SEOmoz crawls your site, they see both URLS: http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html http://weddingdancelessons.com.au/index.html Both have the same title: "Wedding Dance Lessons Sydney | Dancing Lessons to couples to learn their first dance and to look confident at their wedding." Even though to humans there is little deliniaton between the two, it is exteremely important to search engines. The solution to this is to use the rel="cannonical" tag check out this blog post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not, it's dated but still relevant to your case. Once all of your pages have that tag, your SEO issues should resolve themselves Please let me know if you have any more questions Zach

[Zachary_Russell]

We literally just wrote on the same error I ran through screaming frog, and there is definitely duplicate content because of non-canonical URLs.

[RichardB2]

Thanks Paul,

so would this be the correct syntax in line 1 of .htacess file?

Redirect 301 http://weddingdancelessons.com.au http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au

Thanks.

[GeorgeAndrews]

I think you should continue looking at doing a 301 redirect instead.

You can use the canonical tag, but you should do so in cases where you intend to have different URLs for one main page (e.g. www.example.com/blue-widget.html, www.example.com/widgets/blue-widget.html). Here is a another question regarding canonicals where Ryan Kent provides a good explanation for this.

You can learn more about 301 redirecting here. Yoast also provides some information for how to do it here.

[RichardB2]

yes thanks.

I already had:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^weddingdancelessons.com.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au/" [R=301,L]

in my .htaccess file but these errors as per the ref you provided.  So I am not  sure if this is working.

Would

Redirect 301 http://weddingdancelessons.com.au http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au

solve the problem ?

[ThompsonPaul]

That new rule won't catch all the related subpages, Richard.

Here's the standard version I use - give it a shot, then test it.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^weddingdancelessons.com.au$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.weddingdancelessons.com.au$1 [R=301,L]

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

Rel canonical is definitely NOT the preferred way to handle this kind of situation, IMO, Zach. Best practice is to run the 301 redirect to give the Search Engines (and users!) the clearest message as to the Fully Qualified Domain.

This isn't a matter of the 2 URLs needing to exist, which is when you use rel canonical. The second variation serves no possible useful purpose, so should be redirected in order to get rid of it altogether.( In my experience, rel canonical also doesn't seem to reliably pass page influence the way 301s do.)

For example, by doing the redirect, the URL will always appear in the address bar as the www version, so if someone copies that address, they'll always end up using the canonical FQDN.

That said, Richard, you can also use Google Webmaster Tools to tell the  Search Engines that you want your www version to be considered canonical. It's just one more way of signalling to them.

Once this is working, you're going to want to be very careful to always use the FQDN yuorself - ie always write links using the full www.weddingdancelessons.co.uk, whether on your own site or when you're getting links back to yourself.