Huge in crease in on page errors

[MattRoney]

Hi Pete,

Sorry for the delay! I just wanted to let you know I'm looking into it, and should get back to you shortly.

Matt

[Hardley111]

That's awesome Keri,  thanks for following this up  : )

[Hardley111]

Hi Matt,

No probs, I look forward to hearing from  you

Regards

Pete

[Hardley111]

Hi Matt,

Ive just had a look an I  can now see the amount of pages, crawled on our site, is  comparable to our competitors, which is great!

However the amount of on page errors is significantly higher. In particularly the amount of duplicate errors is about 10 000  which is the same amount we had, before our web company fixed this issue. Are you able to give me any feed back as to what's happened there?. Thanks again for your help with this!

Pete

DuplicatePageErrors_4_Nov.jpg.html

[Hardley111]

This post is deleted!

[MattRoney]

Hi Pete,

Sure thing. Sorry it's taken so long!

May I ask what, if any, changes were made on the site between the 21st and 25th of October? In particular, were there any changes made involving rel="canonical"?

[Hardley111]

That's ok Matt. I've put those two questions to our web company, although I don't think any  changes happened then, although I do know that they did work on the 27th of September. I m fairly sure in was rel =canonical in nature. I have asked them to confirm and will let you know in due course. As an aside  why do you think the changes you mentioned would be of effect on our web site?

[MattRoney]

Well, it stands to reason that something must've changed is order to cause such a huge increase. Looking through the list of duplicate URLs, I'm seeing a lot that could be fixed by rel="canonical". There's enough of them that adding a canonical link to each would be a huge undertaking or require some careful coding. I'm wondering if this increase could've been partially caused by someone removing rel="canonical" from a lot of pages.

For example, I'm seeing a lot of this:

http://www.health2000.co.nz/shop/aromatherapy/lemongrass-essential-oil/P4494/C56

vs.

http://www.health2000.co.nz/shop/aromatherapy/lemongrass-essential-oil/p4494/c56

The only difference between those URLs is capitalization. The first, capitalized version is the one that appears on your XML sitemap. I'm not 100% sure why both versions would be appearing to Roger—it may be an issue with the CMS—but a rel="canonical" on the former pointing to the latter would solve that problem.

Now, that doesn't look to be the only issue, but it _is _a large one.

Let me know what you find out!

[Hardley111]

Hi Matt,

I hope things are going well. I'm just following up on the duplicate page issue .I have spoken to our web company and they have correct the issue last week  and I noted the amount of duplicates dropped  significantly. Ive just checked today and i see it's back up (I'm following this up with our web company). Are you able to offer any insights as to why this problem seems to reoccur

I was of the understanding  this is a permanent fix so once the change has been made, I cant understand why it then seems to reoccur?. Any insights would be much appreciated.

Regards

Pete

Dupeissue.jpg.html

[MattRoney]

Just noting that this discussion continues here:

http://moz.com/community/q/ongoing-duplicate