Help talking to an aggressive web team (1st time in the forums)

[Renia]

Hello All!

I am a long-time Moz user, but not super technical myself. I'm used to asking a web team to fix something, based on the reports, and they do it. I'm trying to communicate with a really aggressive web team about a site that's showing about 16,000 errors every week on my Moz reports. What I'm trying to figure out is if they are right or not, so I can either ignore them or push harder. Can someone help me with how to explain these to them or let me know if they are right? These are the two biggies I'm struggling with:

b.      Duplicate page content
Example: https://www.whiteheadindustrial.com/c-104-abrasives.aspx?pagenum=1 and https://www.whiteheadindustrial.com/c-104-abrasives.aspx

Their explanation:

I wonder if MOZ is not reading the infinite scrolling pages the way that Google does. We have followed Google’s directions for how to let Google know that each page is a successor of the previous one, so no duplicate content. But probably MOZ tool does not view the code on the page the same way. So I think this is not relevant for Google indexint.

Second:
Example 2: https://www.whiteheadindustrial.com/p-19708-4-point-mandrel-and-hex-nut-116-hole-18-shank-nocra-13440-m.aspx
https://www.whiteheadindustrial.com/p-30356-working-peanut-knife-no-046-6220-ss.aspx 
In Example 2, the only duplicate content I can find is the “Stocking data Current as of… Please note:..” and the Customer Reviews area.

c.       Duplicate page title
I wonder if MOZ is not reading the infinite scrolling pages the way that Google does; because the duplicate page titles are related to category page

I would be super grateful for any guidance!

[davebuts]

Hi Renia,

I'm not sure what they mean when they say "I wonder if MOZ is not reading the infinite scrolling pages the way that Google does"...
Pagination (rel="next" and rel="prev") and canonical tags are not in place so each page is being indexed individually, and would be causing some issues, as Moz reports. Without these tags in place, Google will not understand that the pages are a series, as your web team suggests.

You can see that they are indexed by doing a Google search for site:https://www.whiteheadindustrial.com/c-104-abrasives.aspx

Or site:whiteheadindustrial.com inurl:pagenum to see that there are over 2,000 in total of these pages indexed.

You could easily overcome this issue by getting the developers to implement pagination and canonical tags on these types of pages.

Your second issue, I think, will always be reported as duplicates in Moz because they use the same overall page template (which is taken into consideration when assessing duplicate content) and there is little unique content on them - this is common on e-commerce sites when there isn't much product information available or products are very similar.

However, I don't think you need to worry about this too much. Google is pretty generous when it comes to product pages like this and you shouldn't be negatively impacted by it.

Your third issue with title tags should be resolved once pagination and canonical tags are implemented correctly throughout the site.

Hope this helps

Cheers,

David

[iugac]

Hi Renia! I am here just to confirm what David said Good luck!

[Renia]

Thank you David! This is exactly what I needed!