Duplicate Content on Product Pages with Canonical Tags

[drewstorys]

Hi,

I'm an SEO Intern for a third party wine delivery company and I'm trying to fix the following issue with the site regarding duplicate content on our product pages:

Just to give you a picture of what I'm dealing with, the duplicate product pages that are being flagged have URLs that have different Geo-variations and Product-Key Variations. This is what Moz's Site Crawler is seeing as Duplicate content for the URL www.example.com/wines/dry-red/:

www.example.com/wines/dry-red/_/N-g123456

www.example.com/wines/dry-red/_/N-g456789

www.example.com/wines/California/_/N-0

We have loads of product pages with dozens of duplicate content and I'm coming to the conclusion that its the product keys that are confusing google. So we had the web development team put the canonical tag on the pages but still they were being flagged by google. I checked the of the pages and found that all the pages that had 2 canonical tags

I understand we should only have one canonical tag in the so I wanted to know if I could just easily remove the second canonical tag and will it solve the duplicate content issue we're currently having?

Any suggestions?

Thanks

-Drew

[davebuts]

Hi Drew,

If you have multiple canonical tags on a single page, Google will ignore both of them so you will definitely need to to remove the old canonical tag so there is only one on each page.

But it sounds like you are trying to use canonical tags correctly to resolve these duplicate content issues.

If you wan't to read more about canonical tags, this recent article by Patrick Stox on Search Engine Land is excellent: http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tags-easy-right-whats-worst-happen-274635

Cheers,

David