Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Check out the SEOMoz Help section:

"Duplicate Page Content

Duplicate Content means there are pages that are identical (or nearly identical) to content on other pages of your site, which can force your pages to unnecessarily compete with each other for rankings.

Here are some things you can do about duplicate pages:

Delete content that is similar on each page.

Add some new and unique content to each page that is on the report. This can be done by adding more information, ideas, product descriptions, or anything that can make it differ from other pages on the domain.

You can also add a rel=canonical to one of the duplicate pages. Here are a few ways to do this:

Add a rel="canonical" link in between the  and elements. This should be done on the version of the page you want to be ranking or that non-canonical version of the two (or multiple) pages.

To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool, create a  element that looks like this: <link rel="canonical"href="<a href="http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool">http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool"/></link rel="canonical"href="<a>

Copy this link into the  section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool&sort=fun.

Keep in mind that that canonicals will stop the pages from ranking against each other, but they will still show up as duplicate content from a UI perspective, so we will still count them as duplicate."

Let me know if this answers your questions.

Mike

Test it in a different browser.

For instance, I use IE for my main surfing habits, Chrome for my SEO and web development, and Firefox to check my Google rankings.

I do this, because I do my Google-ing in IE - so things get cached, Chrome has me signed in all of the time because of my Google accounts, and Firefox I never use.

Also, I am in Minneapolis, MN, so my browser is using the location to display my results.

I just switched my location to Santa Ana, CA and you are coming up #8.

That is why SEOMoz states in their help, "SEOmoz tries to represent the ranking results that “most” users will see."

Make sense?

Mike

Ezpro9 –

If you are looking to do competitive analysis, it sounds like Robert has had good luck with SEMRush.

If you are looking to strictly looking to find this information on your own site, I believe you will get the same or near identical data using the Search Queries functionality in Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Good luck.

Mike

Hi Jesus,

This is an interesting article about how fixing duplicate content increased a websites indexation, in turn increasing their website traffic by 150%.

I would definitely attack the Crawl Errors found ASAP. Duplicate page content, 4XX errors, and missing or duplicate title tags can definitely mess with rankings.

Once you have your errors under control, I would work on the warnings whenever you have time or are bored.

Long story short... the errors can definitely have a big impact on how you are ranking, while the warnings are just a "heads-up".

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

Mike

Correct. When you setup to campaign a subfolder, you will only get crawl diagnostics and reports for that particular subfolder.

SEOMoz Help states, "The PRO Web App crawls, grades and checks rankings only for pages found on that domain or subfolder. When tracking a subfolder, we will only crawl pages that exist in that specific folder. We will not crawl links that go to other folders."

If you were to create 2 campaigns:

subdomain.example.com/USA

subdomain.example.com/Canada

And both pages are in English, you will get different crawl diagnostics and other metrics for these campaigns.

Does that make sense?

Mike

"I accidentally manually submitted the url to google and manually in submitted it to index and that when this issue began...."

It sounds like you accidently added this URL to the index. You can follow the procedure outlined below to request Google remove the specific URL from the index:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59819

I checked your site's structure using Screaming Frog and it does not appear that you are linking to any non-.html versions. If I perform a scan using one of your non-.html pages, it appears that it only links to itself.

Since you have the 301 redirect in place, you can choose to wait it out and Google should correct things eventually; otherwise, requesting Google remove the URL is a faster... PERMANENT process.

Good luck.

Mike

Hi Mirco,

Have you checked out: http://www.seomoz.org/help ?

They have a TON of information on all of the tools and videos on how to set things up.

They also include PRO tips for research, optimization, and fixing issues.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Cool. No worries

StackOverFlow has always been awesome in helping me with my IIS rules and such.

If you Google: site:stackoverflow.com apache redirect

You will see MANY examples of how to set up 301 redirects, including redirecting from non-www to www pages, etc.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Yes. If you do not want the archived pages to be indexed you can use the noindex directive.

This will alert Google to not index those pages and also tell the SEOMoz crawler to not report errors or warnings on those pages.

Mike

Hi Chad,

You are correct. You should list the local phone number on the website and the GetListed.org directories. While 800 numbers are convenient, they do not give any indication as to the location of the business.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Alex,

From a functional standpoint, absolute and relative paths should lead users and spiders to the same page.

There are some pros to using one over the other though:

Relative

-faster to code

-if you switch domains, you won't have to deal with redoing internal links

-your page should be faster, because you have less code for browsers and Google to sift through

Absolute

-leaves little confusion for browsers and spiders, because it is using the EXACT path

-if your site gets scrapped, the links would still point back to your site

-Google Webmaster Tools recommends absolute paths, "Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html)."

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Stan,

I think the reason the first one was rewritten might have been because your actual title is too long. Google limits titles in the SERPs by pixel width, no character count. If you were to change it to this you would be within the character count:

Katadyn Pocket Water Microfilter Review (Video) | Outdoor Gearhead

Same thing with the second page... too long.

And your third page actually appears correctly when you search your entire site with site:outdoorgearhead.com in Google. So I am guessing it is getting rewritten because people probably don't type in, "M.U.L.E hydration pack", they probably use "mule hydration pack"... so I am assuming Google is just trying to appeal to the masses. You could try making this one more descriptive to see if the "." would stick: M.U.L.E. Hydration Pack Reviews | Outdoor Gearhead

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi David,

Are you filtering things under the Advanced Reports tab using Open Site Explorer? If you are, you should be able to get up to 100,000 links.

I have sometimes encountered your issue when I try to export a CSV using one of the other tabs; however, when I use the Advanced Reports tab you can get a lot more data.

If you continue to have issues, I would contact the SEOMoz Help team.

Hope this helps.

Mike

For clarification, the main reason I suggested the local phone number is it will actually look more creditable (in my opinion) when a user is searching business directories.

For instance, if I visit YP.com (which is one of the GetListed directories) and search for "consulting" near "Stockton, CA" I get many results:

1. ABC Company (800)XXX-XXXX

2. DEF Company (209)XXX-XXXX

3. GHI Company (209)XXX-XXXX

...

If I searched for consulting near an area I specified, I personally would rather find a company that has a local area code. This would make more sense to me, because I specified an area... so clearly I want to work locally. If I specify an area and the results return an 800 number, I personally become a little suspicious as to whether the company is actually local or if they just employees in the area that can help me.

I think that when you are adding your information to business directories, I would lead with the local number, then 800 number, because people that are using these directories are looking for solutions for a specific area.

On your website, I would suggest leading with the 800 to establish you have a national presence, then your local phone number.

Good luck.

Mike

As far as when to submit sitemaps, you do not "need" to even submit one. After your initial sitemap is submitted, as long as you have a strong interlinking structure in place, your new pages should be crawled. Submitting a sitemap when you add new pages is more or less a "heads-up" to Google saying, "I added new pages here... you should crawl them when you have time."

Now, if you remove pages from your site, you should also make sure that your sitemap reflects these changes. If you do not, you will start to get 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

I don't think you can overdo it; however, you would probably make less work for yourself if you only resubmitted when you are 100% sure you actually need to.

Does that make sense?

Mike

That really comes down to personal preference.

I personally like company names in the title, as it helps establish branding and provides some authority. For instance, if you changed your 3rd title to remove your company name, "M.U.L.E. Reviews" doesn't tell me a whole lot. I understand it is reviews for something called "M.U.L.E." but I have no idea who is reviewing it or really what a "M.U.L.E." is. If you changed it to something like, "M.U.L.E. Hydration Pack Reviews | Outdoor Gearhead" I would know that "M.U.L.E." must be some kind of hydration pack, that the page is reviewing this type of pack, that the M.U.L.E. hydration pack must have something to do with being outdoors (because of your company name), and that Outdoor Gearhead is the company reviewing this product.

I would recommend removing ".com" from your titles, unless that is part of your company name.

The way I like to think of titles when I create them is that visitors should be able to understand what a page is about without even going there, by looking at the title tag.

Does that make sense?

Mike

It appears correctly on the browser tab and the source code looks accurate.

Please note, the title tag text is also under the "author" tag... which doesn't make sense.

Also, Google is displaying your contact as "Contact - 65 Broadway Dental" instead of the title you have in source.

If you haven't changed the title tag in the past week, I would think it should appear in your SEOMoz report. If you didn't make any changes, you could contact help@seomoz.org to have them look into the issue further for you, because that seems a little odd.

Mike

Rock and roll. Thanks for the explanation.

In terms of SEO, links from completely external sources (domain1.com linking to domain2.com) are better than subdomains linking back to the root (sub.domain1.com to domain1.com).

The reason for this, is that it is assumed you can easily manipulate linking to your root from a subdomain.

Hope this helps.

Mike

You are correct in saying your 301 is not working properly. You will want to get your traffic and link juice associated with your preferred domain as soon as possible.

If you use OpenSiteExplorer, you will see that your non-www version has fewer links than the www version. With this set up, you are essentially splitting your authority between two sites instead of one. According to Google, "Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs. If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages."

Once you get your 301s in place and Google recrawls and reindexes your website, I would think that you would see your number of visitors return to its normal volume.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Like Mike said, it looks like a coding issue.

It looks like /food-retailing/supplies/food-preparation and /food-retailing/supplies/safety-janitorial are both linking to /food-retailing/supplies/

You can use validator.w3.org to check for some coding errors.

A quick glance at things looks like your /food-preparation page has an open tag in the code lines between 1423-1431:

2. Page:

3. 1

4. []( RIGHT HERE YOU ARE MISSING CODE<br />            <br />            <div id= "Page 2")

[That was just a quick glance.

Hope it helps.

Mike]( RIGHT HERE YOU ARE MISSING CODE<br />            <br />            <div id= "Page 2")