Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content

[AlanWills]

I've been a Pro Member for nearly a year and I am bound and determined to finally clean up all the crawl errors on our site PracticeRange.com.

We have 180 errors for Duplicate Page Titles and Duplicate Content.  I fixed many of the pages that were product pages with duplicate content.  Those product descriptions were edited and now have unique content.

However, there remain plenty of the errors that are puzzling.  Many of the errors reference the same pages, for example, the Home Page, Login Page and the Search page (our catalog pages).
In the case of the Catalog Page errors, these type pages would have the same title every time "Search" and the results differ according to category.

http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=6
http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=15

If this is  rel=canonical issue, how do I fix it on a search result page?  I want each of the different category type pages to be indexed.  One of them is no more important than the other. So how would I incorporate the rel=canonical?

In the case of the Home Page errors, I'm really confused.  I don't know where to  start to fix these.  They are the result of a 404 error that leads to the home page.  Is the content of the 404 page the culprit since it contains a link to the home page?

Here are examples of the Home Page type of crawl errors.

http://www.practicerange.com/404.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/Golf-Training-Aids/Golf-Nets/~/Assets/ProductImages/products/Golf-Training-Aids/Rubber-Wooden-Tee-Holder.aspx

http://www.practicerange.com/404.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/Golf-Training-Aids/Golf-Nets/~/Assets/ProductImages/products/Golf-Training-Aid/Impact-Bag.aspx

Thanks ,

Alan WillsPracticeRange.com

[djlaidler]

Hi Alan,

This is a two part question. For the search results I would add

Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx?m=*

To your robots.txt file. I would probably increase to the entirety of search (by removing the ?m= from the line above), but as I don't completely comprehend how your search section works start with the above. It very rare that search pages offer new content,  generally they dilute other pages by duplication.

With your second issue I imagine there are clues in the aspxerrorpath variable. Although I couldn't get any combination of this string to render the below url didn't return to the 404 page like the rest did. Its the tilda (~) in the error string that I think offers the biggest clue.

http://www.practicerange.com/Golf-Training-Aids/Golf-Nets/

Hope this helps,

Dan

[AlanWills]

Thanks Dan,

Got it.  The catalog pages are not beneficial and the duplication could be hurting.

So I added the disallow statement for the Search pages.  We will see if it fixes the problem on our next crawl and change syntax as needed.

Would  a similar disallow for the 404.aspx would solve the Home Page 404 crawl errors?  Something like...

Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/404.aspx?*

Best Regards,

Alan Wills

[djlaidler]

Hi Alan,

Have a look in google webmasters to see if the same 404's are occuring there. If so, they typically give you a list of page that generate the error page. It would be best to eliminate these issues at the source first as they will be offering a poor user experience.

As a prevented measure you could run these pages as a disallow, yes. But I fear that this will make it more difficult to detect these issues in future.

Dan

[AlanWills]

Hi Dan,

Latest SEOMOZ crawl still reports 108 Duplicate Page Titles.  Almost all of them are from the Search page.

Search

http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=5

Search

http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=50

Search

http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=51

Search

http://www.practicerange.com/search.aspx?s=Name ASC&p=52

etc.....

I added Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx but it still picked it up during the crawl. Here is the robots.txt.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /Admin/
Disallow: /App_Themes/
Disallow: /Assets/
Disallow: /Checkout/
Disallow: /ClientApi/
Disallow: /ConLib/
Disallow: /FCKeditor/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /Install/
Disallow: /Layouts/
Disallow: /Members/
Disallow: /webcharts/
Disallow: /Basket.aspx
Disallow: /BuyProduct.ashx
Disallow: /*.axd$
Disallow http://www.practicerange.com/Search.aspx

Sitemap: <http: www.practicerange.com="" sitemap.xml="">Sitemap: http://www.practicerange.com/sitemap.xml</http:>

Am I missing something on the syntax to get the crawl to ignore our Search Pages?

Best Regards,

Alan

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[djlaidler]

Hi Alan,

It seems like you are only targeting the search page, I would suggest adding a * at the end to capture all variations.

Dan

[AlanWills]

Thanks Dan,

I appended the asterisk.  I also tested the robots.txt in google webmaster tools.  It alerted me of the required : colon after the disallow statement.  I missed that somehow.

The next crawl should finally ignore those search catalog pages.

Best Regards,

Alan