How do I eliminate duplicate page titles?

[Keszi]

Hi,

These duplicate URLs can be resolved two ways easily.

1. 301 from non www. to www. or vice versa

2. canonical to one of the links.

This way you will focus all the link juice on only one page. More power

I hope it helped,

Istvan

[ENSO]

Which is better, and also I am interested in knowing why this happens?

[Keszi]

Hi again

So basically canonicals are better.

And why you get this: when robots crawl your website they see the following pages as different:

example.com/index.html

example.com/

www.example.com/index.html

www.example.com

And we could continue with variants. Canonicals tell search engines that these pages are the same, and they should handle it as same page.

so if you put a into index file, you will have the following results:

www.example.com (no matter which URL does the search engine visit, they will handle as the canonical link)

This is also good for links, because people might link to you as example.com or example.com/index, etc. etc. Then if you insert the canonical you focus all the links to one URL.

Hope it helped,

Istvan

[ENSO]

So then in the page without the www I should insert this into the head and do the same for all other pages?

[Keszi]

you just insert into each html file the canonical that points to www url. and it should work it out.

[ENSO]

This actually does not solve the problem. I have only one index.html file. So how in the world do I access a page that does not exist in my hierarchy? For example if I have the following two pages there is really only on instance of that page I can edit the head with an html file, it is not like there is actually 2 html pages that exist for each one so in this case am I just stuck creating redirects for each instance where this occurs?

|

www.ensoplastics.com/ContactUs/ContactUs.html

ensoplastics.com/ContactUs/ContactUs.html

|

[Keszi]

you have 1 page, that can be reached from two or even more paths. we talk about these paths, and these are creating the duplicate content.

It is like having your site duplicate on your non www. of your domain.

With the canonical, you tell search engines which path, which .html file you are optimizing for.

[ENSO]

Ok I will put the canonical in the head of the html files and see what happens.

[Keszi]

ok, good luck!

[ENSO]

Once I add it in and crawl the page I end up with a critical error... so something is not right.

Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical

Moderate fix

<dl>

<dt>Canonical URL</dt>

<dd>"http://www.ensoplastics.com/index.html"</dd>

<dt>Explanation</dt>

<dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd>

<dt>Recommendation</dt>

<dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd>

</dl>

[Keszi]

the index page canonical should point to index page,

the content page to the same content page (it is just for eliminating the duplicate issue)

don't put a canonical that points to a page that is not its duplicate

[Dr-Pete]

I'd follow the advice to 301 or canonical, but it doesn't hurt to also declare a canonical version in Google Webmaster Tools - it's under "Site Configuration" > "Settings". You still need to canonicalize, but it's one additional signal to Google (and it's easy).

[Dr-Pete]

So, just to be clear - these are the same physical page. Google sees the two URLs as being two different pages, but in terms of actual physical documents on your server, there's only one (ContactUs.html). So, you just need the one canonical tag per page.

If you have any dynamic (database/code-driven) pages, then be careful and make sure that the canonical tag is being create dynamically to match the correct page. You don't want to end up with canonical tags to the wrong pages.

[ENSO]

So if I want the www. page to be the one that shows up in google...what do I put in the head of the ContactUs.html page exactly? As you can see when I put this in the head then I get the critical error from SEOMOZ. So this fix just isn't making sense to me right now. IF I take it back out then the critical error is gone but then I get the message that I should add the canonical to the page.

<dt>Canonical URL</dt>

<dd>"http://www.ensoplastics.com/ContactUs/ContactUs.html"</dd>

<dt>Explanation</dt>

<dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd>

<dt>Recommendation</dt>

<dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd>

[Dr-Pete]

I don't see anything wrong with your home-page canonical. We usually suggest pointing the home-page to the root:

...and not including the filename (just for the home-page), but that's not necessary. You link internally to "index.html", so what you have is fine, and keeps it consistent. I think the error is only happening because our crawler is trying to view the "/" version and sees the canonical to "index.html" (so, they look different).

[Keszi]

thank you for the follow up, Dr. Pete!