Why are my 301 redirects and duplicate pages (with canonicals) still showing up as duplicates in Webmaster Tools?

[bearpaw]

My guess is that in time Google will realize that my duplicate content is not actually duplicate content, but in the meantime I'd like to get your guys feedback.

The reporting in Webmaster Tools looks something like this.

Duplicates

• /url1.html
• /url2.html
• /url3.html
• /category/product/url.html
• /category2/product/url.html

url3.html is the true canonical page in the list above._ url1.html,_ and url2.html are old URLs that 301 to url3.html. So, it seems my bases are covered there.

_/category/product/url.html _and _/category2/product/url.html _ do not redirect. They are the same page as url3.html. Each of the category URLs has a canonical URL of url3.html in the header. So, it seems my bases are covered there as well.

Can I expect Google to pick up on this? Why wouldn't it understand this already?

[MonicaOConnor]

Do you have more than 1 canonical tag on any of these pages? If you do, Google will ignore any tag.

Have you set the preferred version of your site? Is it possible that Google sees both the www and non www versions of your site?

[bearpaw]

Preferred version is already set to WWW. Also, all canonicals point to the same URL and I do not have more than one per page.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Tyler,

Is this still going on? My first reaction would be to say that Google will probably figure it out over time and the notifications will disappear/not reoccur. Have you seen new notifications of duplicate content since you made these changes?

Are these pages still appearing in the index? If not I wouldn't be super concerned - WMT updates lag behind what's going on in the index by quite a bit. If they are, take a look at the cache date - it may be that Google needs to crawl these pages again to find the canonical tag.

Since Google doesn't always "get" canonical tags, you may not see this error go away in WMT - as long as those pages are no longer ranking for anything, though, you should be OK. The redirects should stop registering as duplicate content sooner rather than later, though.