Duplicate titles Question

[anoopbal]

Hi eveyone,

I have around 1000 duplicate titles and meta description. The poblem was that I had pages in my home page and different pages had the same title.

For example,

index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/

/index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N12//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1444//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1448//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1448/P6//index.php/site/articles/should_you_eat_protein_every_2-3_hours_for_muscle_growth/N1452/I have 172 of the same page!So I took off all the pagination on my home page and just added 'click fo more'. When they click more, it takes them to the category.So my question is will google slowly start deleting or non-indexing  these duplicate titles or pages as I have removed it from my website? (Just so that you know I added a canonical link and figuring out how to add page numbers to met titles and meta description tags for categories with pages)

[Dr-Pete]

I'm not entirely clear what the nature of the non-paginated pages is, but the canonical tag is probably a decent solution here. You may actually want to leave the crawl paths to those URLs open for a bit - Google won't process the canonicals unless they crawl the URLs. See my recent post on that subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/logic-meet-google-crawling-to-deindex

Pagination is a bit tougher. You've got a few options:

(1) META NOINDEX pages 2+ (tends to be pretty effective, but depends on the nature of the pages)

(2) Use Rel=prev and Rel=next. This is tough to implement, but is recommended by Google. If the pagination isn't massive-scale, it works reasonably well.

(3) If the pagination is controlled by URL parameters, indicate them in Google Webmaster Tools. I've had mixed luck with this, and your examples wouldn't work ("/P6" isn't going to come up as a traditional URL variable).

[anoopbal]

In my category page, I have the links of the article and short summary  of it. For example, check this page: http://www.exercisebiology.com/index.php/site/training/

So if I get you right, I shouldn't use the canonical for home page and categories since the content changes as I post new articles, right?

[anthonydnelson]

Do not use the canonical tag unless the pages are 100% duplicates.

If you are talking about duplicate content from your blog posts showing up on category pages, perhaps you can edit your blog settings to only show snippets of each post instead of the entire thing.

[anoopbal]

Thank you much Anthony.

I have pages on home page and category that obviously needs pages so that every arrticle don't show up in one long page. How do  deal with those?

1) Just keep them the same and add a rel=canonical to it? Or since they have different content on each page ( or different article titles), just leave out the rel=canonical?

[anthonydnelson]

Yes. Google will stop indexing most of the duplicate pages since you added the canonical tag.

Figure out why there are so many duplicate pages and try to eliminate that problem. I'm guessing your comment about 'click more, it takes them to the category page' addressed this issue. It's best to stop a problem before it starts.

These pages may fall slowly out of Google's index. They will likely leave Webmaster Tools at an even slower rate. If this doesn't seem to work out for you, another option would be to 301 every page ending with growth/N* back to the canonical version.