Why is moz telling me I have duplicate content, but neither the content nor the urls are duplicates?

[damon1212]

I just upgraded our website to a new one.   This is the first crawl of the new website.  It is telling me I have 24 Critical issues, all of which are duplicate content errors.

Thing is, the urls are not duplicates and the content on the page is not duplicated either.   Example, here is one error where it says there are two duplicates:

<colgroup><col width="595"></colgroup>
| http://winterguardtarps.com/portfolio-item/props-10 |
| http://winterguardtarps.com/portfolio-item/props-2 |
| http://winterguardtarps.com/portfolio-item/props-7 |

There are photos in our portfolio, and none of them are the same.

I'm a bit of a noob, but what am I missing here?

[Lumina]

It's showing as duplicate content because aside from an image and caption, there's no content on this page. Low-to-zero content pages that follow the same template / structure will often be seen as duplicate content. Sorry to say, but these pages should either have content added to them, or deindexed. The latter is much easier, of course, and both are almost guaranteed to improve your site. But adding content would be the better solution. It'll add value to those pages, you won't be removing the pages from indexation, and it can incentivize engagement.

[damon1212]

Oh man, thanks Bryan!   That makes perfect sense.   These were all images in the gallery, so on their own they have no content per se . . . I was not really aware they had an indexed page of their own.   I checked it out, and looks like it will be easy to simply add some copy for each.

Thanks a bunch!

[ChiarynMiranda]

To add to Bryan's advice, I just wanted to clarify how we count things as duplicates. Our tool has a 90% tolerance for duplicate content, which means it will flag any content that has 90% of the same code between pages. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text, so often it's a matter of finding the best answer for resolving the specific type of pages being marked as duplicates.

There are more in-depth explanations of common answers to duplicate content on this page, if you're curious!: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content