Search Console: Duplicates

[wdburgdorf]

Hi,

I am trying to fix issues found on Google Search Console. The biggest issue currently is duplicates, and these are almost all Phoca Download documents. The reason is that all downloads actually appear twice: Once for each language of the site.
The documents are the same for both languages, but the paths to the download pages are different. Therefore each document has two paths.
Example:
thesite.com/customer-center/downloads/category/29-the-document?download=31:my-datasheet
thesite.com/de/kundencenter/downloads/category/29-the-document?download=31:my-datasheet

Since no canonicals are possible for documents (I believe), the solution would be to have always the same download link for the same document, whatever the path to the download page is.

Is it possible to set up Phoca Download like that?

Thank you!

Kind regards,
Ralf

[Jan]

Hi, Phoca Download does not create menu links so it does not decide which links are created or which links display the document. When the ID of the document is checked because of download - only ID and category ID is checked not the language, so this is maybe why the document is accessible throw the not language and langauge SEF link. The question is, if there will be check for language, does it solve it anything, because it just does not prevent from creating both formats of the link

Jan

[wdburgdorf]

Hi Jan,
Thanks for your reply. I believe it could be possible to redirect all requests to documents to a single URL in htaccess, that could solve the duplicates. Especially since there could be more URLs directing to downloads, I already fixed the sitemap to not contain additional URLs that exist already.
The ideal solution, I think, would be to be able to define a canonical link for each document in the document settings. I don't know if that's feasible and would not be too much work for you to implement. But then, I assume that there are many sites that have this issue, perhaps not aware of it.
I found that the lates version has "new parameter: Render Canonical URL". I have not tried, not sure if it helps. If it just adds the meta parameter to every page, it would not be useful. If I could set it myself, this could be what I'm looking for. Will try soon.
Cheers,
Ralf

[Jan]

Ok

[plamen]

Not sure if this is related, but I have the following issue for some files (pdf) in my site posted using PD:

"Duplicate without user-selected canonical

This page is a duplicate of another page, although it doesn't indicate a preferred canonical page. Google has chosen the other page as the canonical for this page, and so will not serve this page in Search. You can Inspect this URL to see which URL Google considers canonical for this page.

This is not an error, but is working as intended, because Google does not serve duplicate pages. However, if you think that Google has chosen the wrong URL as canonical, you can explicitly mark the canonical for this page. Alternately, if you think that this page is not a duplicate of the Google-chosen canonical, you should ensure that the content differs substantially between the two pages."

My site is not multilingual as in the original post.

I admit, this is not an error, but could be addressed in some way?
PD and J! are the latest as of the time of posting.

[Jan]

Hi, it depends on how many menu links do you create, if one, there should be always one form of the URL, if more, it can happen that two or more menu links will do different URLs.

Jan

[plamen]

I see.
Actually situation is like that:
I have a PD category with several files in it.
Physically, they are located in:

Code: Select all

https://mysite.com/phocadownload/category_1/file_1.pdf
https://mysite.com/phocadownload/category_1/file_2.pdf

The menu item pointing to the subject PD category is disabled.
Visitors can't list https://mysite.com/phocadownload/category_1
However, the Google bot appears to be capable of doing so.
And https://mysite.com/phocadownload/category_1/file_1.pdf is known to the search engine.
It may be a remnant from the time when the menu item was enabled, but it is no longer relevant now.
So, my questions:

- Is it possible to have 'nofollow, noindex` in robots.txt for disabled files/folders/menu items?
- Shall this reduce complaints from Google Search Console?