MOZ identifies duplicate titles - one has' www' in the title
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MOZ has identified duplicate titles - one has' www' in the title. - we have a few pieces of content where the same thing is happening. Not sure how this has happened. Should we do something about this? Will it cause problems for ranking?
| KETAMINE GUIDE FOR DRUG WORKERS - free | Harm reduction informationhttp://substance.org.uk/harm-reduction-information/ketamine-guide-for-drug-workers-free | 13 | 2 |
| KETAMINE GUIDE FOR DRUG WORKERS - free | Harm reduction informationhttp://www.substance.org.uk/harm-reduction-information/ketamine-guide-for-drug-workers-free | 13 | 4 |1 - 2 of 2
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Hi Ian,
I'm afraid right now you've got a bigger problem than the actual issue of the meta title.
You currently have duplication due to there being no sitewide redirect between www and non-www.
Whilst technically identical content, on a technical level these are in fact two different version:
http://substance.org.uk/harm-reduction-information/ketamine-guide-for-drug-workers-free
http://www.substance.org.uk/harm-reduction-information/ketamine-guide-for-drug-workers-free
It's also highly advisable that you set up a SSL certificate so you can have a secure HTTPS domain. Especially as it looks like you are a shop.
Best regards,
Nick
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Thanks for the response Nick. Why does a website end up with identical content like this? What should we do about it?
We process orders through Shopify. Do we need an SSL certificate?
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It's sort of a legacy quirk of the internet, how HTTP works and files are accessed on the internet I suppose. Basically "computers" do make a distinction between different file paths, even if they ultimately point to the same resource.
You need to choose a canonical version i.e a main version and then redirect the others to that.
Either choose which version you prefer www or non www, or quickly see which one has more backlinks and then go with that one.
I can see you're on Joomla, so this guide should help: https://joomlaseo.com/checklist/choose-www-or-non-www
With regards to why you need HTTPs, the biggest justification is that Google now treats it as a ranking factor and a quality signal: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
Technically your checkout is secure as you said but as per the above, it's still advisable your traffic is encrypted.
Hope this helps,
Nick
P.S
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Thanks Nick,
We use SH404SEF on our site, We will ask them if their tool can help with this.
Ian