Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Our sitemap has always been generated correctly and updated very often with GWT.
Over night our rankings hit somewhat of a glitch and a few very important keywords fell down the results.
no changes were made to the site so i started looking into other areas.
as mentioned in the subject, our GWT is reporting that some of our sitemap links have been duplicated.
could this add to the detremental affect on our search engine listings?
many thanks
For recent ranking changes, lots of strange activity is being discussed in our July Updates thread [webmasterworld.com]. You're not alone in being confounded by July changes.
After updating some pages, I resubmitted our sitemap and received "Duplicate URL - This URL is a duplicate of another URL in the sitemap. Please remove it and resubmit." message from Google. Updated pages do not have duplicate URL and I did not make any changes in any page other than adding two pages. Error message is not related to new pages but one of the old pages.
It assume that this a -hopefully temporary- crawling glitch as our websites are quite old and had not such problem before.
Anybody having similar experience and receiving duplicate URL message during the last 24 hours?
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:32 am (utc) on July 30, 2009]
I believe this is a temporary bug in WMT
I have gone to Webmaster Tools >> Internal Links.
The page that comes up shows the individual pages of my website and to the right shows the number of links to that page.
I have clicked on one of those numbers to see what internal pages are linked to that specific page.
When I view the contents of the "This table provides a list of internal pages that link to..." page I see that the URL's of some (even many) pages are listed twice or more (sometimes up to five times).
My first assumption was that it was a cononical problem. I'm on a windows server and possibly I made some capitalization errors. I dealt with this problem many years ago and am pretty sure that this problem (as far as internal linking goes) no longer exists. Even if it still does exist, I would think that it would just be some isolated cases, not the widespread multiple-pages problem I see in the WMT internal links report. (Within the last week I have used the <link rel="canonical" .... tag on every page to help with this problem.)
My second assumption was that the duplicates were shown because there were "on-page internal links", meaning anchors (<a name=""><a>) used on the page, like "'page top," "page bottom" navigation. But when I look at the HTML (my pages are static html) the number of internal anchor-based links does not add up (it can be more or less) to the number of duplicate URL's I see in the WMT internal links report.
Can someone provide me with an explanation regarding why I see the duplicate URL's listed in the WMT internal links report. Is it a problem? How do I resolve this issue?
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:26 am (utc) on Sep. 1, 2009]
