Duplicate Page Errors

[TCPReliable]

Hey guys,

I'm wondering if anyone can help... Here is my issue...

Our website:
http://www.cryopak.com
It's built on Concrete 5 CMS

I'm noticing a ton of duplicate page errors (9530 to be exact).  I'm looking at the issues and it looks like it is being caused by the CMS.  For instance the home page seems to be duplicating..

http://www.cryopak.com/en/
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=67
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=25
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=4
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=66

Do you think this is an issue? Is their anyway to fix this issue? It seems to be happening on every page.

Thanks

Jim

[David-Kley]

There are two ways to fix this.

First is to redirect all the pages to the proper home page, using a 301. Duplicate pages are bad for seo. Google likes to see one set of content, for each URL. See the webmaster tools article on duplicate content here.

Second is to go into webmaster tools, and set the true URL for this page, using the "URL parameters" function. This way, you can set the proper version of the page, so Google knows what to index. Be very careful when doing this, as you can mess up the way Google sees your site. There is a video on the link, I would watch it, and do a bit of reading first.

[DonnaDuncan]

Hi James,

I suggest you canonical the duplicate pages rather than 301 redirect them. Using canonical tags instead of 301 redirects will allow you to preserve any incoming link equity from external links to those pages. With a 301 redirect, you'll lose that equity.

David may have run your site through Open Site Explorer (OSE) and seen that there's very few incoming links to the duplicate pages and therefore felt it unnecessary to canonicalize them. I see only 8 from the example you gave us above, but don’t want to assume that’s all there is, especially when you're saying you see duplicates on the site, If you have webmaster tools set up, you can get a more exhaustive list of incoming links there.

The other thing I noticed is that the incoming links to the sample pages are coming from a cryopak subdomain on another site. Here are the ones I can see using OSE.

|

http://cryopak.spydertrapdev.com/en/resources/cryopak-news/anthony-alleva-presenting-temp-maintenance-biopharmaceutical/

http://cryopak.spydertrapdev.com/product_line/default.aspx?DepartmentId=25

http://cryopak.spydertrapdev.com/en/resources/cryopak-news/anthony-alleva-presenting-temp-maintenance-biopharmaceutical/

http://cryopak.spydertrapdev.com/product_line/default.aspx?DepartmentId=4

http://cryopak.spydertrapdev.com/en/resources/cryopak-news/anthony-alleva-presenting-temp-maintenance-biopharmaceutical/

http://cryopak.spydertrapdev.com/product_line/default.aspx?DepartmentId=66

http://cryopak.spydertrapdev.com/en/resources/cryopak-news/anthony-alleva-presenting-temp-maintenance-biopharmaceutical/

http://cryopak.spydertrapdev.com/product_line/default.aspx?DepartmentId=67

|

I get an error when I try to look at spydertrapdev.com so can't tell if that's a development environment that's been set up for your site or what. These may not be links you want to maintain. You’ll have to decide.

Good luck.

Donna

[TCPReliable]

Okay.. well I don't see any duplicate page issues in webmaster tools but I only see them in the SEO Moz Craw Errors report. So if they aren't showing up in webmaster tools should I really worry about this???

I can't edit those pages individually because those pages don't exist they are just a product of the CMS system generating those URL strings with the numbers. So I don't think I can canonical tag those pages.

I guess I can group them together and do 301 redirects??

Yes.. http://cryopak.spydertrapdev.com/  is just a dev environment.

[DonnaDuncan]

James,

I did a scan of your site. Your problem appears to have several sources. Do you know how to use the screamingfrog scan utility? It's free for sites with less than 500 pages. When I ran a scan on your site, looking only at the html pages, i came up with 283.

• You have search result pages indexed that shouldn't be. They'll look like duplicates to Google.
• You have product pages that contain a lot of the same content, for example http://www.cryopak.com/en/cold-chain-packaging/pre-qualified-shipping-containers/timesaver-2-8-c-series/timesaver24-24-hour-pre-qualified-shipper/  and  http://www.cryopak.com/en/cold-chain-packaging/pre-qualified-shipping-containers/timesaver-2-8-c-series/timesaver48-48-hour-pre-qualified-shipper/ (24-24-hour vs 48-48-hour).
• You have different pages with the exact same title tag.
• You have some pages that are identical with one extra character in the URL e.g. http://www.cryopak.com/en/about and http://www.cryopak.com/en/about/. See that extra slash at the end?

I suggest you run and scan and inventory to get a good idea of where your problems are.

I'm not seeing your http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=xx (where xx represents 67, 25, 4 and 66) in the scan results. They're not redirecting and I don't see a canonical tag in the source code so I don't know what to tell you about those.

If it helps, I can direct message you a CSV file with the results of my scan.

[Dr-Pete]

I ran a crawl with Xenu (similar to what Donna did with Screaming Frog), and came across some deep page that may be causing this problem. For example, on this page...

http://www.cryopak.com/en/resources/cryopak-news/anthony-alleva-presenting-temp-maintenance-biopharmaceutical/

...the last link to "phase change material" goes to:

http://www.cryopak.com/product_line/default.aspx?DepartmentId=67

...which then redirects to...

http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=67

It seems like multiple pages share that template, so one canonical tag might clean up a lot. I'd have to understand the site structure a lot better to advise, though. Google doesn't seem to be indexing these URLs, so they probably aren't a huge problem, but they could be diluting your ranking power. It's worth cleaning them up.

[TCPReliable]

Thanks everyone for the help. This should def. help clean up some of the problems that I've been having with the website.