Find Content Issues - Help Hub (2024)

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I do with WordPress tag pages causing duplicate content?

If you know that your WordPress tag pages are creating duplicate content in Moz Pro Site Crawl then you can use the Ignore function so we won't flag them every week. If you don't want your tag pages showing up in the search results then you can add a noindex tag to your WordPress tag pages through WordPress. Whether you do this is up to you and your particular site setup. Here is a great blog post for setting up WordPress.

Overview of Content Issues in Moz Pro Site Crawl

These issues relate to your content and how Google views it. Duplicate, thin, and slow content, for example, can negatively impact rankings. Content issues vary in severity, but resolving them may improve your site's ability to rank.

How to fix

There are a few different ways you can fix this issue when simply changing the content is not an option: consider adding 301 redirects to direct duplicate pages to the one you want people to visit, adding the rel=canonical tag to your canonical (most authoritative) page, or using the Parameter Handling Tool in Google Search Console.

Learn more about duplicate content and how to address it

Duplicate Content from Dynamic URLs

Moz Pro Site Crawl counts dynamic URLs as duplicate content. While we are pretty sure that search engines can figure this stuff out and know which URL to index, it's still considered best practice to canonicalize or otherwise direct crawlers to the original URL. Since some dynamic URL generators can cause problems for crawlers, we do try to be overly-inclusive of these issues rather than excluding these pages.

Duplicate content with a canonical tag in place

Canonical tags identify which page holds the original content. Without a canonical tag, each page is being considered the most important page with that content, but the content is so similar that the pages continue to compete against each other for rankings. All duplicate pages need to point to a single source.

If you have canonical tags in place but your pages are still being flagged as duplicates it could be because your canonical tags point to different URLs. Let's consider that Page 1, 2, 3, and 4 are duplicates:

To set up your canonical tags correctly, all 4 pages need to reference a single source. If Page 1 is the original, then all duplicate pages need to include this tag:

Tracking Issue Resolution Progress

As you work through issues flagged in your Campaign’s Site Crawl section you can track your progress by marking issues as fixed or by ignoring them.

Mark as fixed: Marking an issue as Fixed will indicate to our crawler that you have taken action on your site to resolve the issue. During the next crawl of your site, the issue will be removed from the interface if the crawler does not encounter the same issue again. If the issue is still found it will be marked as Not fixed in your Site Crawl data.
Ignore: Marking an issue as Ignore will indicate to our crawler that you are aware of the issue but are not planning to take action to resolve it. The crawler will not include the issue in upcoming crawls as a result. You can Unignore issues at any time from your Campaign Settings.

To mark issues as Fixed or Ignore, select them using the checkboxes on the left and then clicking Mark as fixed or Ignore from the top right.

For issues marked as Fixed, if our crawler does not encounter those issues in the next crawl they will be removed from your list of site crawl issues. If the issue is still found, it will be marked as Not fixed.