WMT Showing Duplicate Meta Description Issues Altough Posts Were Redirected

[Tiberiu]

Dear Moz Community,

Some time ago we've change the structure of our website and we've redirected the old URL's to the new ones. About 2,000 posts were redirected at that time.

While checking Webmaster Tools a few days ago I've discovered that about 500 duplicate meta-description issues appear in the "HTML Improvements" area. To my surprise, altough the old posts were redirected to the new path, WMT sees the description of the old posts similar with the one of the new post. Moreover, after changing the structure all meta-descriptions were modified and they weren't the same used before the restructure.

For example I've redirected /blog/taxi-transfer-from-merton-sw19-to-london-city-airport/ to /destinations/greater-london/merton-sw19/taxi-transfer-to-london-city-airport-from-merton/

Now they are shown as  having duplicate content. I've checked the redirects and they are working.

I get the same error from the redirected pages for about 150 titles.

Did anyone else get this errors or can you please offer me some suggestions about how I can fix this?

Thank you in advance!

Tiberiu

[JarnoNijzing]

Tiberiu,

So google WMT is giving these errors? I've had this in the past with a site of a client. Issues were long solved and still Google WMT gives these errors. What does moz.com campaign say? Do the same errors occur here? It could well be a glitch of bug in Google WMT.

Regards

Jarno

[CleverPhD]

I have seen this exact issue before in GWT on a site I work with.  It is annoying, but does look to happen on larger sites.  Here is what we did to fix our issue.  This assumes you already have the proper 301 redirects in place.

1. Add the canonical link to self on all the new pages

2. Wait for Google bot to spider them

3. Wait for GWT to update the status in the report

It is not a quick fix as it takes a while for steps 2 & 3 to cycle though as not all pages are spidered at the same rate.  it may take you several months to see it all work itself out.

On this same site, I now also see if I have a new post that I then change the URL and add a 301 that GWT goes through this same process.  Again, it is really annoying as I have the 301 in place, I have sent a clear directive to Google that the new page is replacing the old and they show the duplicate error for the old and new URLs in GWT.

I cannot see any logic in why this happens and why the report shows the way that it does.   My best guess is that GWT is doing some batch processing and the sequence is off on what is looked at when and so this is a side effect of that process.  It is like the spider first sees the new and old URLs from the 301 and logs both URLs.  What should happen next is the next batch process should account for the 301 redirects and take out the old URLs, instead the process to check duplicate titles and descriptions runs and generates the duplicate report before the 301 cleanup process can get to it.  Disclaimer, I am not a developer etc, but just trying to guess at the logic of "why".

If anyone else has any insight on why this happens, I would love to hear it.  I have been able to "fix" the issue using the steps above, but it was in reality not broken to start with.   It works out as one of the Moz rx is to use self canonicalizing links to help with scrapers, parameters etc.  I just wish GWT was more useful in this sense as I have to sort out all the "errors" to get to the real issues.  I end up having to use the Moz crawl or Screaming Frog etc to get at this information.

[Tiberiu]

Dear CleverPHD,

Thank you for your answer. Your advice sounds pretty good but let me see if I got your suggestion clearly. So, from what I understand, you are saying that for the page www.example.com**/blog/taxi-transfer-from-merton-sw19-to-london-city-airport/ **I should add the following as the rel canonical?

Thank you once again!

Best regards,

Tiberiu

[CleverPhD]

Yes - assuming this is the final/good page, you have it canonical link to itself.

See #5 on this post by DP

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions