Duplicate Content & Rel Canonical Tag not working

cp_web

I'm really questioning the legitimacy of the duplicate content flags with moz. I'm building a website that sells home decor products and a lot of the pages are similar in structure (As would be expected with a store that sells thousands of individual products). It seems a little overkill to me to flag the following pages as duplicate content. They have different urls, titles, h1, h2, and h3 tages, different meta tags, etc. Right now, it's saying that the following have duplicate page content:

Any ideas?

Also, it seems like it's not honoring the rel-canonical tag. It keeps saying that pages with a rel canonical tag are duplicates when some of the urls that it's flagging shouldn't even be indexed because of the canonical tag. The "pi" in the query string should not be indexed!

LoganRay

Hi,

Regarding the first set of URLs: I took a look at a handful of those URLs, and it's entirely possible that you're getting duplicate notices on those. Rogerbot flags any 2 pages as duplicates if the source code of those URLs matches at 90% or more. So it's not identical, but not different enough that search engines can discern. Most of the products you've listed there have no content, or a very small amount, meaning that when you consider the rest of the code involved with that page, it mostly matches the homepage.

Regarding the second set: I ran those URLs through Screaming Frog and don't see any canonical tags. Keep in mind, just because URLs aren't indexed in search engines, doesn't mean Rogerbot doesn't have access to them.

*Update - on further digging, I think I found the source of all of your duplicate issues. Both www and non-www versions of your URLs are accessible. One of them should redirect to the other, doesn't matter which, but both should not render.

cp_web

Thank you very much for your response! On the paginated pages I don't think you're supposed to use the canonical tag. Instead you're supposed to use the next/prev tag which is what I did. the next/prev tag points only to pages without query string values and those are the pages that are supposed to be indexed. So there shouldn't be individual pages that are separated by query string values right? They should all use non query string value pages.

Even though I do have both www and non www pages accessible, on all of the pages, I am either using the canonical tag or the next/prev tag on paginated pages. Shouldn't that tell search engines which to index??

LoganRay

That is correct, you should be using rel=next/prev for markup on paginated sections. But after noticing the www and non-www issue, I don't think your problem is related to canonicals or prev/next.

Regardless of what you're doing with canonical tags or prev/next, you pages should never be accessible at both www and non-www versions. You're going to be at a duplicate content risk as long as both versions exist.

cp_web

Ok thank you!

cp_web

Is is the same way with https and non https pages? Should only one of those be accessible per page?

LoganRay

No problem! Yes, same is true for HTTP and HTTPS

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Duplicate Content & Rel Canonical Tag not working

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