Duplicate Content even when Canonical is used

[EcomLkwd]

Hi Everyone,

Our website uses the Magento platform which is notorious for creating duplicate content. I tried to make sure that all the duplicate content it creates should be "canonicalized" to the correct page.

While looking through the moz Page Diagnostics I see that I have 1003(!) pages of duplicate content. When I downloaded the csv I saw that over 95% of them had a canonical url.

Does that mean there is really no issue but moz analytics is still reading it as duplicate content and titles? Is there an issue with them being canonicals as opposed to being redirected?

Thanks!

[William.Lau]

I'm not 100% but perhaps Moz doesn't crawl duplicate pages and their code. It could be more about title tags, meta data etc.

As long as your canonical tags are in place and pointing to the original source, you should be fine.

[EcomLkwd]

Are you sure? I have some pages that have many other urls. Is it better if they are redirected?

[William.Lau]

If you have duplicate content, the best practices are typically 301 redirects or canonicals. This would really depend what type of pages they are, whether they are campaigns, parameters, pagination(could use prev/next).

If you have an example we should be able to tell what you should do for that example.

[EcomLkwd]

Hi William,

Thanks for responding.

This is the url for the correct page: http://www.plasticplace.com/business/trash-bags-for-rollaway-cans

Here's a sample of a bunch of urls that are "canonicalized" to that page: (the minor differences on this page are based on the selection that you choose from the left hover, if a user going through the regular navigation chooses something, it doesn't affect the url.)

http://www.plasticplace.com/business/trash-bags-for-rollaway-cans?gallon_capacity=368

http://www.plasticplace.com/business/trash-bags-for-rollaway-cans?gallon_capacity=358

http://www.plasticplace.com/business/trash-bags-for-rollaway-cans?thickness_values=106

http://www.plasticplace.com/business/trash-bags-for-rollaway-cans?thickness_values=54

http://www.plasticplace.com/business/trash-bags-for-rollaway-cans?thickness_values=352

http://www.plasticplace.com/business/trash-bags-for-rollaway-cans?p=2

Thanks!

[William.Lau]

Your canonicals are good. You should not worry about that URL and those duplicate pages in specific.

For clarification: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

Also you can try to search the caonicalized URL and see if its indexed, in this case it is not.'

For example search:http://www.plasticplace.com/business/trash-bags-for-rollaway-cans?gallon_capacity=368

And your original URL will apepar in SERPs.

[MoosaHemani]

Canonicals hint Google about what is the original page location and not really Moz crawler so Moz might still show the duplicate content (As far as I think). The better idea in my opinion is to search Google and see if they have still indexing the pages that you really didn’t want Google to crawl.

There are times (I am facing this one of my client) that Google does not get the canonical signal in that case I think we left with 3 options.

-          Update the canonical tag once again and let the Google spider crawl the website again and hope this time it work! (very lame)

-          Make the pages unique enough that we didn’t really want to use the canonical tag. (very difficult)

-          Redirect 301 the pages to the original content (not possible in all cases)

Hope this clears the picture!

[mstoic]

I have the exactly same problems like you with Moz ereports. But after some research, I found out that the main problem here is that Moz is talking about the duplicate title tag and description (if you show on category and other pages).

[ggale]

We had a similar problem we thought with duplicates after placing canonical tags on all our pages. Moz took about a week as did Woorank to update and decide the canonicals were in place and showing no duplicate content.

We have a fairly small site with a little under 100 pages but this was a significant amount of work inserting the canonical tags and we were a little worried initially that they continued to show as duplicates for a short time.

Gary