Duplicate Content/Missing Meta Description | Pages DO NOT EXISIT!

[PrimePay]

Hello all,

For the last few months, Moz has been showing us that our site has roughly 2,000 duplicate content errors. Pages that were actually duplicate content, I took care of accordingly using best practice (301 redirects, canonicalization,etc.). Still remaining after these fixes were errors showing for pages that we have never created.

Our homepage is www.primepay.com. An example of pages that are being shown as duplicate content is http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/payroll/online-payroll with a referring page of http://primepay.com/blog/%5BLink%20to%20-%20http:/www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/payroll/payroll/online-payroll. Some of these are even now showing up as 403 and 404 errors.

The only real page on our site within that URL strand is primepay.com/payroll or primepay.com/payroll/online-payroll. Therefore, I am not sure where Moz is getting these pages from.

Another issue we are having in relation to duplicate content is that moz is showing old campaign url’s tacked on to our blog page i.e. http://primepay.com/blog?title=&page=2&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogCTA&utm_campaign=IRSblogpost&qt-blog_tabs=1.

As of this morning, our duplicate content went from 2,000 to 18,000. I exported all of our crawl diagnostics data and looked to see what the referring pages were, and even they are not pages that we have created. When you click on these links, they take you to a random point in time from the homepage of our blog; some dating back to 2010.

I checked our crawl stats in both Google and Bing’s Webmaster tool, and there are no duplicate content or 400 level errors being reporting from their crawl. My team is truly at a loss with trying to resolve this issue and any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.

[EricaMcGillivray]

Getting you some help for direct advice on your problem, but wanted to leave a comment about the tool itself. When you are looking at the Moz crawl tool, it only updates once a week, so if there hasn't been that long between the last crawl and when you did the work, it won't be updated. Here's more info.

[Toddfoster]

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=http%3A%2F%2Fprimepay.com%2Fblog%2F%255BLink%2520to%2520-%2520http%3A%2Fwww.primepay.com%2Fen%2Fpayrollservices%2Fpayroll%2Fpayroll%2Fonline-payroll&useragent=1&typeProtocol=11

Example:

http://primepay.com/blog/hgehergreg

Status:

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=http%3A%2F%2Fprimepay.com%2Fblog%2Fhgehergreg&useragent=1&typeProtocol=11

My site as an example:

https://caseo.ca/blog/hgehergreg

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcaseo.ca%2Fblog%2Fhgehergreg&useragent=1&typeProtocol=11

If I put in random gibberish in this URL, it should be displaying a 404 page and not the blog page.

[DirkC]

You shouldn't use campaign tracking to check internal links - you have to use event tracking. Check http://cutroni.com/blog/2010/03/30/tracking-internal-campaigns-with-google-analytics/ . Apart from the reporting issue - it's also generating a huge number of url's that need to be crawled by Google bot and is just wasting it's time (most of these tagged url have a correct canonical version). You mention these tags are old - but they are still present on a lost of pages.
For cases like this it's better to check with a local tool like Screaming Frog which gives you a much better view which pages are generating these links.

The other issue you have is probably related to a few pages that have a bad formatted (relative) url in a link - the way your site is configured it's just rendering a page on your site - so the bots are then crawling your site over and over again, each time encountering the same bad relative link - and each time adding the bad formatting to the url. It's an endless loop - best way to avoid this is to use absolute internal links rather than relative links. Not sure if it's the only one - but one of the pages with this error is :http://primepay.com/blog/7-ways-find-right-payroll-service-your-company  - it contains a link to

[Your payroll service is no different.]([Link to - http://www.primepay.com/en/payrollservices/] "Your payroll service is no different.")

This page should generate a 404 but is generating a 200 and the loop starts here.

Again - with screaming frog you can for each of these bad url's you can generate a crawl path report which shows you exactly on which page the error is generated.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[evolvingSEO]

Hey there

Dirk pretty much hit upon the issue, which I'll reiterate with a visual. If you enter any gibberish /blog URL (like this: http://primepay.com/blog/jglkjglkjg) in the browser it returns a 200 OK which, but it should return a 404 code --> http://screencast.com/t/cStpPB5zE

Otherwise pages that are really broken will look to crawlers like they are supposed to exist.

[PrimePay]

Thanks Dirk. Very insightful tip about not using campaign tracking to check internal links. There was an old blog post that had anchor text with campaign tracking that was causing many SEO issues. As for the latter part, it is unknown why a string of gibberish can be placed after /blog/ and also for our locations page. Our team's web developer is looking further into this issue. If anyone has any more advice on the matter it would be greatly appreciated.