Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"
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Hello,
I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content.
Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?"
Any help much appreciated!
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@rj_dale have you added a rel=canonical tag to the page to make sure you're marking to Google the correct version of the page? Even if it doesn't have a duplicate page, add a self-referencing canonical tag and if you need any more help - speak to a freelance seo consultant.
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Based on your description, it appears as though the page is already indexed in the search engine. This is being picked up by the Moz tool and being reported as duplicate content.
What you can try to do is - for the page that is flagged by the Moz tool as duplicate enter it in Google as the following
site:example.com/moz-flagged-duplicate-url
This will show if the page is already indexed.
If the page is indexed, I would recommend you to:
a) Review the two or more similar URLs flagged as duplicates and see if they are actual duplicates or a tool-based error. If it is a tool based error you can ignore the issue. If you think the pages are actual duplicates you can evaluate pages in terms of backlinks or incoming traffic and choose the preferred page version that should be indexed in search engines. Place a canonical tag of the preferred page version on all the pages flagged as duplicate.
b) Please remove the noindex tag. This is not the right technique to handle duplicate content for SEO results.
c) You would have to wait for Google to crawl and update results. You can promote your new page on social media, email marketing campaigns, or build backlinks to the page. With time search engines will pick up these changes and updates its indexed results.
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