How come canonicalized pages are showing in the Duplicate Titles report?

[StevenLevine]

I am currently removing all duplicate titles from my site via title tag changes, 301's, and in some instances, canonical tags.

I'm confused about why the Moz report spit out pages with duplicate titles that are canonicalized to other pages. Does Google actually consider these pages as having duplicate titles? Or is Roger Mozbot not intuitive enough to to disregard those pages?

[Kinquela]

Hi,

I recently made the same question to moz support, here is my question and the reply:

QUESTION:

I am having a problem with a duplicated content error

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Crawl Issues Report - Duplicate Page Content for Bajalibros Argentina (www.bajalibros.com/AR)

Generated at Wed Jul 27 15:22:27 +00:00 2016

---

URL 
https://www.bajalibros.com/AR/Samanta-Schweblin-Autor-426833

https://www.bajalibros.com/AR/Catherine-Clement-Autor-184525 

THE REPLY

Hi there! I think this has to do with how our tools determine what is duplicate content. Our tool has a 90% tolerance for duplicate content, which means it will flag any content that has 90% of the same code between pages. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text, so often it's a matter of finding the best answer for the duplicate pages in question.

For instance, often with ecommerce sites, product pages will come up with duplicate content between two colors of the same item, and in that case it's good to use the canonical tag. If there are two versions of the site that exist - for instance, example.com/subfolder andwww.example.com/subfolder - you can put in 301 redirects to the correct page: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection. If it's just two pages on different subjects but thin content, filling out that content with an extra paragraph or two can help.

There are more in-depth explanations of common answers to duplicate content on this page, if you're curious!: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or if there's anything that needs clarifying!

Hope this applies to you too

Best

[tawnycase]

Hi there! Tawny from the Help Team here. Sergio's answer is helpful if you're dealing with duplicate content issues, and the links in that answer might help you figure out how to resolve those issues!

Pages are considered to have duplicate titles only if their titles are exact matches. There is no notion of overlapping or partial matches for this purpose. Like duplicate content, canonical versions should be considered, but not pages that refer to the canonical version. Furthermore, two pages with blank titles should not be considered duplicates of one another.

You can verify the page title by viewing the source code of the page itself. I hope this helps! Drop us a line at help@moz.com if you have any other questions or if there's anything that needs clarifying!

[StevenLevine]

Thanks for your response. So you are saying that the pages that are canonicalized to the same page still are considered duplicates?

Let's say that Page A, Page B, and Page C all have the same title, with Page A being the canonical page. If Page B and Page C are both canonicalized to Page A, does that mean that Page B and C are considered to have duplicate titles while A is okay?

[tawnycase]

Pages canonicalized to the same page aren't duplicates, but their titles may still be. Canonicalization only affects the content of the page, not the title; the pages can still be resolved separately in the browser, so their titles may still be duplicates of one another.

If there are pages you don't want to surface in search results, you can noindex, follow those pages to prevent them showing up.

Sorry if my previous answer was a bit confusing! Hope this helps! If you've got more questions, feel free to write in to help@moz.com and we'll do what we can to sort things out for ya!

[StevenLevine]

Got it! Thank you.

[tawnycase]

Any time!

[Joe.Robison]

Just jumping in here even though it's an old question.

The thing is, Moz is crawling the pages and showing duplicate titles, but if you have page B using rel=caonical pointing to page A, then Google will reference page A.

It's ok if page A and page B have the same title if using rel=canonical, because Google will follow that directive most of the time.

So if Moz is surfacing duplicate title tags but they are canonicalizing, it's safe to ignore Moz's flagged issue. Don't always take it at face value.

It would most likely be a waste of time to go change all the page titles for the duplicate pages if you're using rel=canonical.