New to Moz and wanted a bit of help with my report

[dannylancs]

Hi,

I have used the MOZ report to analyse one of my friends sites and I wanted to query a few warnings it highlighted and I just wanted people's thought on how important they thought these were:

The first is dupliate descriptions/titles. This is mainly down the e-commerce pages.

Fist duplicate content:
On some pages the description is identical and all that is different is the title and picture, is this an issue?

Duplicate pages:
Due to the way the website folder structure/catergories has been created some pages are identical but because the product comes under 2 cetergories there is 2 seperate pages, should we use the canonical on one of the pages?

Also regarding the canonical tag, they have put link rel="canonical" on every page and got it to point at itself, so not really being used in the way it is meant to be. Could something like this cause any harm?

The final thing is internal linking back to the homepage. If for example the homepage is http://www.test.com, when linking back is it best to put the full URL over "index.html" even though they are the same page?

Any help really appreciated

Dan

[BrianJGomez]

1. Yes, make sure description is different for each page
2. So are there two pages in two different categories or one page being crawled twice? If it's two seperate pages in different categories I would change the title tag to something like 'Product X Category 1' and then 'Product X Category 2'. I would do the same thing with the description as well. If it's one page being crawled (possibly indexed twice) I would pick a category based on potential traffic and get rid of the 2nd category.
3. Who's they? I'm not understanding this canonical question
4. It should not make a difference whether you're using a full url or short url format.

[Ron_McCabe]

Daniel,

I like the tutorial information on the SEO Yoast web site.  Their 101 section has a some great tutorials.  I like their information on duplicate content: http://yoast.com/articles/duplicate-content/

Rel Canonical:http://yoast.com/wordpress/canonical/

Good luck!

Ron

[dannylancs]

Thanks for the reponse.

Regarding point 3:

When the website was initially made, the person making it has put this line on every page:

[dannylancs]

Also on point 2, in this situation would it not be best just to use a canonical tag pointing one of the pages at the other to avoid the duplicate content in Google's eyes?

[MikeRoberts]

In reports, Canonicals are listed as a Notice not an error or a warning. Notices are just interesting facts about your site. So those aren't wrong. Many people have said that adding the canonical tag on a page pointing to itself is a good precautionary measure for if the page gets scraped.

As for http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/index.php ... They may look like the same page to you but they are not to the bots. You should choose 1 and redirect the other to it.

[dannylancs]

Great thanks. Just on this point, would it be better to use the canonicals tag to point at the other page or just slightly ammend one of the pages?

Duplicate pages:
Due to the way the website folder structure/catergories has been created some pages are identical but because the product comes under 2 cetergories there is 2 seperate pages, should we use the canonical on one of the pages?

[MikeRoberts]

Since I don't know the exact nature of your duplicate pages, its a little hard to give a solid answer. Firstly, a canonical is a signal not a directive... so the search engines can choose to disregard it. Second, there are a few ways to consider handling duplicate page content. If your duplicate needs to exist for some reason and is a straight copy of another page or features a duplicate subset of content found on another page, then you could consider a canonical. If the duplicate page serves no real purpose and there is a better version of it elsewhere, then you could go with a 301. If the page needs to exist but could be re-written into something more relevant than its current state, do some tweaking to make it unique.