A lot of duplicate content issues - does Moz understand canonical URL?

[speedbird1229]

Hi,

Since I subscribed to Moz my Magento store has given a lot of duplicate content issues. However, I did have a problem with Canonical URL at the time. It has been settled for a couple of weeks by now and although I had 302 redirects before, I configured Magento to 301 today. Since Moz has been crawling and showing duplicate content for exactly the same Magento pages but with endings like store=us, store=aus etc (since I have several store views enabled), I am wondering whether canonical URL does actually help Google to skip these versions of the duplicate pages and does Moz also understand it and will it reduce the amount of duplicate content errors once the 301 redirects and canonical URLs have been properly set for a week or so?

Thanks!

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

The moz crawler should respect canonical urls and will not flag them as duplicate content as long as they are set up correctly. There should be no time lag in this process, if the tags are set up correctly then the next time you get a crawl report the canonicals should be recognized. If you are still seeing duplicate content issues then there might well be a problem in the canonical setup so it would be good to double check and make sure the canonicals are setup and working the way you expect them to be (Magento can be a bit of a nightmare with these kind of things!).

[max.favilli]

Check my answer to similar question: http://moz.com/community/q/pages-with-rel-next-prev-still-crawling-as-duplicate

Even if you add a canonical url, those pages are technically duplicated, that's why moz report will keep reporting them as duplicate, in the report the canonical url is shown in a different column, so if you don't care about them you can just filter them out.