: Why are these pages showing as duplicate content in Google Webmaster Tools? The following two URLs are showing up as having duplicate meta descriptions in my Google Webmaster Tools and I have

@Sue5673885

There could be many issues. First of all without the real URLs and a lock in your Webmaster Central we could not be sure what the exact issue is. May be you have an wrong implementation of the canonical tag or other problems like, additional noindex, other indexing issues...

Beyond that small/fresh/penalized sites will be crawled less often and it actually may take months until changes will be considered by Google. This will be worsened if the URLs are not linked any more or if they are only linked deep in your websites hierarchy AND/OR if their content is rarely changing. Google is scheduling its crawl priority by the link popularity of the URLs (how intense are URLs linked) and how frequent the Content changes.

Furthermore Google may ignore even correct implemented canonical tags if the content and the HTML code of the both documents is not significantly duplicate.

There are some general things to check:


Try a info:URL request in Google:

info:http://www.example.com/lingerie-bras-gaffs/crossdressing-lingerie-sets?dir=asc&order=sku&p=3

If the target URL of the canonical-tag is showing INSTEAD of the requested URL Google it probably obeying it. If nothing is showing up, you my have an indexing issue with that URL. If the requested URL is showing up, you could additionally check how old Googles version is via locking at the date of the cached version.
You could also check your server access logs whether a Googlebot has visited the specific URLs between your implementation of the canonical tag / your addition of the parameters AND your fetch of the URLs via the “Fetch as Googlebot Tool”. If not, your question is answered (Google simply has not visited/indexed the URLs yet).

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@Angela700

We need to see the real URL's to help you. From what I see it's the same URL, sorted differently. But the p parameter may be a product so the URL's could be two product URL's. Google may simply not have updated their cache of the page to check if the meta descriptions are unique.

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