Canonicalized Website

[Moxicopy.com]

We are new to SEO MOZ, and as we are doing our evaluation, multiple page problems have arisen.  Our domain is www.moxicopy.com and www.moxicopy.com/blog.

Our blog is wordpress hosted but integrated into our site.  As we ran our analytics from MOZ PRO, we got TONS of Duplicate Page Title and Duplicate Page Content warnings, over 90 each.

Most seem to come from our blog and our different products (we are an ecommerce website).

Would the canonicalization of the pages be the cause?

And couuld someone further explain exactly what canonical/canonicalization is>?  I am very confused, and have a feeling that this is what has hurt our site so much in the last 2-3 weeks

[MikeRoberts]

Ah, WordPress. Yes, all of your duplicate title tag and duplicate content warnings are probably caused by the way that WordPress handles archives out of the box. WordPress has all of your tag archive pages, category pages, author archives, etc. set to Index. So this means one post is duplicated in a potentially infinite amount of places (depending on the number of tags on it) and every page2/page3/page4 winds up duplicating the title tag.

What works well for many is picking up a plugin like Yoast; changing the post preview setting to the snippet instead of full (That way you don't have the full post appearing on every page, only a blurb until you click through to the page where the post actually sits); set Tag Archives, Author Archives, and potentially Category Archives to NoIndex,Follow; and look into cleaning up any useless One-Off tags.

As for what Canonicalization is... in simple terms its like a redirect except for bots only. The tag lets the search engines know that you feel a page is a duplicate or a subset of another page and would like them original canon page to rank in its place and they redirect equity towards that place while leaving the page intact, visible and accessible to the general populace.

[Modi]

You need to determine first, what is causing duplicate

• is it Tags - which are causing duplicates

• Is it like index.php file where site is getting crawled with www.moxicopy.com/blog/index.php

• is it that a blog is accessed by 2 or more urls like with or without category :- www.moxicopy.com/blog/category/topic and www.maxicopy.com/blog/topic

You need to identify the cause, will suggest

• Noindex to Tags

• Apply canonical from index.php pages and category pages

Point is :- A page should be accessed by 1 url only and all other duplicate should be canonical to original url. This will lead Search Engines to not only index your site better, but even the page authority will also be highest with the main page.