Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?

[Peter.Huxley59]

We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages.

The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title.

e.g.

Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products

MasterPet Product page1

MasterPet Product page2

Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title.

From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this?

Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.

[RyanKent]

I took a look at a few of your pages. Your issue is a common one and can easily be fixed.

Let's use your Rock-N-Roller Bunny page as an example:

http://masterpet.com.au/NZ_Products/Small-Animal/Sml-Animal-Specials/Rock-N-Roller-Bunny/

http://www.masterpet.com.au/NZ_Products/Small-Animal/Sml-Animal-Specials/Rock-N-Roller-Bunny/

Both of the above links go to the exact same page. The first link does not include the www in the URL. While these two links go to the same page, they are seen as two separate pages, and that is causing duplicate content issues. To resolve the problem take the following steps:

1. Decide which version of your URL you wish to use, the www or non-www form.

2. If you haven't already done so, log into Google Web Master Tools and set your preferred URL format.

3. Going forward, ensure any links you create for your site use the chosen URL format.

4. Add a canonical tag to your pages. This tag is a single link of HTML code added to the head of each page. If you decided upon using the www the format would be: http://www.masterpet.com.au/NZ_Products/Small-Animal/Sml-Animal-Specials/Rock-N-Roller-Bunny/" />

You may also wish to use a redirect in your .htaccess file to send visitors to the correct format of your page.

If you have a common template or structure for your site then these changes can all be done very quickly and then you can crawl your site again to confirm the matter is resolved.

[Peter.Huxley59]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it. But I'm a bit more concerned with the example I presented wherein product pages are displayed on several pages where the first URL is identified by ?pg=1 and the second URL by ?pg=2

For the WWW and non www, we can fix that one, but for the sample I presented, I'm not sure how to go about it.

[RyanKent]

?pg=2, etc. is referred to by Google as parameters.

If you only want the main page to appear in search results, and you are confident of this decision, you can log into your Google Webmaster Tools and adjust your settings. From your Dashboard screen choose Site Configuration > Seetings  > Parameter Handling. In the Parameter column you will see "page" listed. Change the action to "Ignore".

With the above noted, page-2 content would normally be viewed as it's own, unique page. Your product list on page-2 (or whatever you are listing) would be different then page 1. If you provide content on each page such as product descriptions, etc. then you shouldn't have the problem of page-2 duplicating page 1.

[Peter.Huxley59]

Sorry, but when you say "Google Webmaster tools," is it inside the seomoz pro dashboard? Or do I need to create a google webmaster account?

The reports I've given came from one of our Campaigns inside the SEOmoz PRo Dashboard. I don't see a Site Configuration here.

With the ?pg=2 parameter, is there a way for google not to treat it as two URLs with same title and at the same time make both appear in search results?

[RyanKent]

When you say "Google Webmaster tools," is it inside the seomoz pro dashboard? Or do I need to create a google webmaster account?

If you have a website, you should definitely have a Google WMT account. Go to www.google.com/webmasters and register your site. It is a must for anyone who cares about SEO for their site and related analytics.

For the SEOmoz report, I asked that same question to SEOmoz help. The reply I received was:

"it sounds you made a change to the way your site is indexed by Google directly in Webmaster Tools. Since we don't have access to GWT, we can't account for any changes that you've made in there, unfortunately. Furthermore, these issues are still present for crawlers other than Googlebot, so if you want to make sure those fixes are indexed by Bing/Yahoo, make sure to submit the fixes to their index tools or make the changes directly on your site. On the other hand, if you don't care about those search engines, feel free to just ignore our warnings. Our software is over-inclusive of errors so that you can choose which errors/warnings/issues to act on and how. We'd rather give you too much information than too little!"

With the ?pg=2 parameter, is there a way for google not to treat it as two URLs with same title and at the same time make both appear in search results?

In Google WMT you can see the Parameter Action as Don't Ignore. You would then need to fix the Duplicate Title issue on your site.

I am not advising this approach, but merely responding to your question of how to do it.