Duplicate Page Titles & Content

[ZaddleMarketing]

We have just launched a new version of a website and after running it through SEOMOZ we have over 6000 duplicate title & content errors. (awesome)

We have products that show up multiple times under different URLs however we "thought" we had implemented the rel=canonical correctly.

My question is - do these errors still show up in SEOMOZ despite the canonical tags being there OR if they were "correct" would we be getting "zero" errors?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

All things being equal, if the canonical tags are properly implemented you should see zero.

For ecomm sites, it is pretty easy to get duplicate title and content warnings from similar but not identical product pages which is usually an indication of thin content (no descriptions or one line descriptions that are almost identical).

So first line of enquiry is to confirm the canonicals are really doing what you expect them to be doing and if after the next crawl you still see duplicate issues then download them in a csv and start investigating them to see which pages are being flagged.

Hope that helps!

[Sarbs]

I am afraid i don’t know the detailed ins and outs of SEOMozs products, however we have some paginated pages on one of our sites. Our crawl reports are not showing errors for duplicate page titles and they are detailed in the notices section as canonical.

This implies to me that the crawl reports do ignore correctly formatted canonical tags. Perhaps you could download the error list and the list of discovered canonical tags and compare the two to confirm. Alternately try crawling the site with other tools, the one i would recommend is Screaming Frog as this will allow you to filter canonical tags in the reports, and do it for free.

[ZaddleMarketing]

Thanks for the responses - sort of what I feared but haven't implemented canonical tags before so was unsure whether they should be showing.

Looks like there is a long day ahead

[Peterli]

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out to us!  I'm sorry if there are any confusions regarding the way we classify duplicate content. Just clarify a few things, here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:

Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,

If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
The examples you've provided actually fall into the fourth example I've listed above.

For more information on using canonical tags, check out this great post by our very own Dr. Pete:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Best,

Peter
SEOmoz Help Team.

[Red_Orbit]

Hey Peter, I'm just having problems with the 4th example, and I believe you are doing it wrong. Not to try to point out problems with your software, but the report that I now have is more or less unusable for my clients because you see the duplicates this way.

What we have, is duplicates reaching to different categories with canonical set up.

B references A in category 1
D references C in category 2
and hundreds more ...

But, because B and D are empty, except for the navigation, the tool sees B and D as duplicates. Two problems with that:
1. They are not even "considered" by Google, because they reference something else as a canonical, so they are not duplicates of each other.
2. The report now shows 10 different pages from different categories as duplicates, and with the number of false identified duplicates it is now impossible for me to find any real duplicates.

So, is my understanding wrong, and what can we do to find the really duplicated pages?

Thanks,

[SEOAndy]

how are you getting on, did this get resolved?

[ZaddleMarketing]

Hi Ladies & Gents

It was a canonical tag error - we went from 6000 errors to 11500 errors and now after the issue was fixed we have a handful of non related errors to sort.

Really appreciate all the feedback.

Kind Regards

Liam