Duplicate content, despite having correct canonical tags

[Havs1]

Hi there

We've run a report today which shows we have 157 pages with duplicate content. Out of these 157, 134 have canonical tags so I'm not sure why they're showing up in the reports as being duplicate.

Here's an example, this page:

https://www.havaianasaustralia.com.au/Accessories?category=beach-towels

.....has an canonical of:

http://www.havaianasaustralia.com.au/beach-towels-havaianas-accessories

But it's still showing as duplicated in your reports.

Any support would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Alick300]

Hi Jacob,

First I would suggest you to check in other tools e.g screaming frog. There is similar question asked earlier please see all the replies here @ https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-issue-in-moz-crawl-despite-canonical

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[jocameron]

Hello Jacob,

Thanks for reaching out, Jo from the Moz support team here.

I've investigated your example and it looks like Accessories?category=beach-towels has 15 duplicates with canonical tags pointing to different URLs.  For canonicals to work they need to point to the same URL.

I've exported the csv from your Moz Pro Site Crawl and located your example URL below:

https://www.havaianasaustralia.com.au/Accessories?category=beach-towels

From here I've scrolled over to the Duplicate URL column and grabbed those URLs then checked the page source for the rel=canonical tag.

Here are a couple of examples of what I've found:

It looks like this page https://www.havaianasaustralia.com.au/Accessories?category=keyrings

Has this tag rel="canonical" href="http://www.havaianasaustralia.com.au/Accessories"/>

This page https://www.havaianasaustralia.com.au/Accessories?category=towels

Has this tag rel="canonical" href="http://www.havaianasaustralia.com.au/towels-havaianas-accessories">

So the page Accessories?category=beach-towels will be picked up as having duplicates as those 15 pages have 90% of the same code between pages. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text.

You can also run your own check using this tool: http://smallseotools.com/similar-page-checker/

I hope this helps, if there is anything else I can help you with please do let me know

Cheers!
Jo