Moz Crawl Shows Duplicate Content Which Doesn't Seem To Appear In Google?

[scottiedog]

Morning All,

First post, be gentle!

So I had Moz crawl our website with 2500 high priority issues of duplicate content, not good.  However if I just do a simple site:www.myurl.com in Google, I cannot see these duplicate pages....very odd.

Here is an example....
http://goo.gl/GXTE0I
http://goo.gl/dcAqdU

So the same page has a different URL, Moz brings this up as an issue, I would agree with that.  However if I google both URL's in Google, they will both bring up the same page but with the original URL of http://goo.gl/zDzI7j ...in other words, two different URL's bring up the same indexed page in Google....weird

I thought about using a wildcard in the robots.txt to disallow these duplicate pages with poor URL's....something like....

Disallow: /*display.php?product_id

However, I read various posts that it might not help our issues?  Don't want to make things worse.

On another note, my colleague paid for a "SEO service" and they just dumped 1000's of back-links to our website, of course that's come back to bite us in the behind.  Anyone have any recommendations for a good service to remove these back-links?

Thanks in advance!!

[Linda-Vassily]

It is not unusual for the same page to be reachable by multiple URLs. This can be caused by tracking parameters or site search results (which is what I think is happening in your case). The easiest fix for this is putting a canonical URL on the page using the one Google has indexed. But keep in mind that duplicate content does not cause a penalty as such, it just causes Google to make a choice about which URL to display in the search results and it seems that choice has already been made in your case. (I would still add the canonicals, though.)

[scottiedog]

Hi Linda,

Thanks for the advice, I was doing some reading of canonical URL's and your suggest does appear to be exactly what they are suggesting.  Looks like Ill have a bit of work in store for me!