Crawl diagnostics incorrectly reporting duplicate page titles

[brad_dubs]

Hi guys,

I have a question in regards to the duplicate page titles being reported in my crawl diagnostics. It appears that the URL parameter "?ctm" is causing the crawler to think that duplicate pages exist. In GWT, we've specified to use the representative URL when that parameter is used. It appears to be working, since when I search site:http://www.causes.com/about?ctm=home, I am served a single search result for www.causes.com/about. That begs the question, why is the SEOMoz crawler saying there is duplicate page titles when Google isn't (doesn't appear under the HTML improvements for duplicate page titles)? A canonical URL is not used for this page so I'm assuming that may be one reason why. The only other thing I can think of is that Google's crawler is simply "smarter" than the Moz crawler (no offense, you guys put out an awesome product!).

Any help is greatly appreciated and I'm looking forward to being an active participant in the Q&A community!

Cheers,

Brad

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Bradley,

You're right; Google's crawler is way more sophisticated than ours is because they have a lot more resources, be they engineers or finances, to pour into their crawler. We think our crawl provides tremendous value and is an excellent way to discover and understand the architecture of your site at scale, but it's not that strange that it wouldn't line up with exactly what a site: search reveals. We also don't always know how Google (or other search engine bots) is going to consider a set of pages, so we would rather be safe than sorry with the data we provide.

Since the page http://www.causes.com/about?ctm=home is linked to from another page on your site (www.causes.com) and resolves with a 200 status, our crawler sees it as an individual page and won't associate it with the main /about page. Instead, it just compares the code and content with the other pages we've crawled and reports back when we find duplicates.

I hope this helps clear things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Chiaryn
Help Team Ninja

[brad_dubs]

Thanks for the thorough response Chiaryn! I figured as much but wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking anything.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Glad I could help, Bradley. Let us know if you need help with anything else.