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How to resolve bad duplicates found on Ahrefs Site Audit
How to resolve bad duplicates found on Ahrefs Site Audit

Find out how to resolve bad duplicates on your site.

May avatar
Written by May
Updated over a week ago

The crawl is completed within your Ahrefs' Site Audit and you see the following graph in your Overview Report - bad duplicates everywhere. So now what? 

Here are some best practices on how you can resolve these. 

For an entire site with duplicate content + meta tags

This is exactly the case of what happened in the diagram above - the site was available in both the http and https protocols and so there was an identical copy of every page. 

In this scenario, do configure a redirect from the http to the https version of the site and that should resolve all the duplicates. 

For pages with duplicate content

You either want to delete the duplicate pages altogether or noindex them or add a rel=“canonical” link pointing to the single page version you want to be indexed (canonical page).

For pages with duplicate meta tags

Meta tags that we are referring here are title tags, meta descriptions, H1 tag etc. 

In a case where the meta tags is similar while content is different for 2 pages, it's important to ensure there is unique meta tags for each page, that would best reflect the content of that page. 

Pro Tip: A unique and well-crafted title tag and meta description have a higher chance of getting the click. Read how to craft the perfect SEO title tag.

For paginated content

Pagination occurs when a website segments content over a series of pages. Here are some examples: 

  • On an e-commerce site, this will take the form of product and category listings. 

  • On a news site, articles may be divided up across multiple pages or arranged in the form of a slideshow. 

  • On forums, groups and topic threads will typically span at least 2-3 pages.

  • On blogs, which tend to feature article previews ordered from latest to oldest, will run into pagination issues on their homepage.

Option 1: Specify a View-All Page and rel=“canonical” 

Create a separate “View-All” page apart from the paginated series and include all of the items within this single page. 

Then, add add a rel=“canonical” link to the component pages to tell Google that the View All version is the version you want to appear in search results.

Option 2: Rel=“prev”/“next”

Use rel="next" and rel="prev” links to indicate the relationship between component URLs. 

For region/location specific pages with duplicated content

There may be multiple versions of a page for different languages or regions. For example, page versions for US, UK, AU, etc. might easily have duplicated content if they have no hreflang attributes in place. 

To avoid duplication issues, add proper hrelflang attributes to all the page language versions to show which of the pages (based on language or region) should show up in a search. 

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