Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate without user-selected canonical excluded
-
We have pdf files uploaded in the media of wordpress and used in our website. As these pdfs are duplicate content of the original publishers, we have marked links to these pdf urls as nofollow. These pages are also disallowed in robots.txt
Now, Google Search Console has shown these pages Excluded as "Duplicate without user-selected canonical"
As it comes out we cannot use canonical tag with pdf pages so as to point to the original pdf source
If we embed a pdf viewer in our website and fetch the pdfs by passing the urls of the original publisher, would the pdfs be still read as text by google and again create duplicate content issue? Another thing, when the pdf expires and is removed, it would lead to 404 error.
If we direct our users to the third party website, then it would add up to our bounce rate.
What should be the appropriate way to handle duplicate pdfs?
Thanks
-
From what I have read, so much of the web is duplicate content so it really doesn't matter if the pdf is on other sites; let google figure it out. (example, every car brand dealer has a pdf of the same car model brochure on their dealer site) No big deal. Visitors will be landing on your site from other search relevance - the duplicate pdf doesn't matter. Just my take. Adrian
-
Sorry, I mean pdf files only
-
As the pdf pages are marked as a duplicate and not the pdf files, then you should check which page has duplicate content compared to it, and take the needed measures (canonical tags or 301 redirect) form the page with less rank to the page with more rank. Alternatively, you can edit the content so that it isn't anymore duplicate.
If I had a link to the site and duplicate pages, I would be able to give you a more detailed response.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
[email protected] -
Hello Daniel
The pdfs are duplicates from another site.
The thing is that we have already disallowed the pdfs in the robots.txt file.
Now, what happened is this - We have a set of pages (let's call them content pages) which we had disallowed in the robots file as they had thin content. Those pages have links to their respective third party pdfs, which have been marked as nofollow. The pdfs are also disallowed in the robots file.
Few days back, we improved our content pages and removed them from robots file so that they can be indexed. Pdfs are still disallowed. Despite being disallowed, we have come across this issue with the pdf pages as "Duplicate without user-selected canonical."
I hope I make myself clear. Any insights now please.
-
If the pdfs are duplicate within your own site, then the best solution would be for you to link to the same document from different sources. Then you can delete the duplicated documents and 301 redirect them to the original.
If the pdfs are duplicate from another site, then disallowing them on robots.txt will stop them from being marked as a duplicate, as the crawler will not be able to access them at all. It will just take some time for them to be updated on google search console.
If however, you want to add canonical tags to the pdf documents (or other non-HTML documents), you can add it to the HTTP header through the .htaccess file. You can find a tutorial on how to do that in this article.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
[email protected]
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Few pages without SSL
Hi, A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured. A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work. It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection. Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking? Regards,
Tom1 -
Does Google ignore duplicate meta descriptions?
Hi there SEO mozzers, I am dealing with a website that has duplicate meta descriptions (we know is bad).As a punishment, Google totally ignores the meta descriptions and picks content from the website and displays it in SERP. I already read the https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description but I was wondering if there is more information/knowledge out there. Any tips are appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Europarl_SEO_Team0 -
Googlebot being redirected but not users?
Hi, We seem to have a slightly odd issue. We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc. One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc. On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers0 -
Duplicate content due to parked domains
I have a main ecommerce website with unique content and decent back links. I had few domains parked on the main website as well specific product pages. These domains had some type in traffic. Some where exact product names. So main main website www.maindomain.com had domain1.com , domain2.com parked on it. Also had domian3.com parked on www.maindomain.com/product1. This caused lot of duplicate content issues. 12 months back, all the parked domains were changed to 301 redirects. I also added all the domains to google webmaster tools. Then removed main directory from google index. Now realize few of the additional domains are indexed and causing duplicate content. My question is what other steps can I take to avoid the duplicate content for my my website 1. Provide change of address in Google search console. Is there any downside in providing change of address pointing to a website? Also domains pointing to a specific url , cannot provide change of address 2. Provide a remove page from google index request in Google search console. It is temporary and last 6 months. Even if the pages are removed from Google index, would google still see them duplicates? 3. Ask google to fetch each url under other domains and submit to google index. This would hopefully remove the urls under domain1.com and doamin2.com eventually due to 301 redirects. 4. Add canonical urls for all pages in the main site. so google will eventually remove content from doman1 and domain2.com due to canonical links. This wil take time for google to update their index 5. Point these domains elsewhere to remove duplicate contents eventually. But it will take time for google to update their index with new non duplicate content. Which of these options are best best to my issue and which ones are potentially dangerous? I would rather not to point these domains elsewhere. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Pagination duplicate title and meta description
Hello, Getting a lot of duplicate title and meta description errors via google webmaster tools. For best SEO practices, do i no-index the page/2's, page/3's...? More importantly, i see how MOZ did it by adding "page 3" to their titles such as http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog?page=3. Is that a better way of doing it? If so, how do i do that on Yoast SEO? Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0