Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Lost with conical, nofollow noindex. Not sure how to use it on a dyanmic php site with multiple region select options
-
I have a site with multiple regions the main page after a region is selected is login.php but the regions are defined by ?rid=11 , 12, etc. These are being picked up as duplicate content but they are all different regions. As i hired external php coders to develop most of the site I am scared to start meddling with any of the raw code and would like some advise on how to not show these as duplicate content. should i use noindex nofollow or connical? if Connical how do i set it up on the main login.php page? p.s. i am an extreme nube to seo
-
Great! Look forward to see your results
-
Hi mememax,
Thank you for the simple yet detailed explanation, really helped me out a lot.
I will try the conical and let you know how it goes.
-
Hi Moby, first of all the difference between all the tags you mention:
- canonical: is a meta tag which indicates which page containing the same content is the original one, It may be used from one page to another to indicate which one is the main one or a as a self canonical indicating the same page where it is located, because you can avoid duplciates due to sessions id or other kind of tags (trackings and the like)
- noindex: is a meta tag which indicates to bots to not include that page to their index. It's used to avoid low quality pages to being shown in serps
- nofollow: is both a meta, used to avoid search engines to crawl all the links in one page, or is used attached to a link to indicate bots to not pass value to that link.
So if you got pages which are identical you want to use the canonical in both the original page (as a self canonical) and in the other oines pointing to the original one. If they're are almost identical. If they're not you may want to:
- noindex those duplicates
- add quality content to the other regions pages so google finds that they're not identical at all.
Maybe your regions pages are seen as identical due to:
- low content, an image and slight changes to the title tag is not enough to mark a page as different, try to add good content, or mash content from other pages.
- is the content accessible when not logged in? If not google is seeing identical pages because its bots cannot crawl the content (bots cannot login)
About the login page you may noindex it, but I don't see any hurry to make changes to that page.
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can I still monitor noindex, nofollow pages with Google Analytics?
I have a private/login site where all pages are noindex, nofollow. Can I still monitor external site links with Google Analytics?
Technical SEO | | jasmine.silver0 -
Can you use multiple videos without sacrificing load times?
We're using a lot of videos on our new website (www.4com.co.uk), but our immediate discovery has been that this has a negative impact on load times. We use a third party (Vidyard) to host our videos but we also tried YouTube and didn't see any difference. I was wondering if there's a way of using multiple videos without seeing this load speed issue or whether we just need to go with a different approach. Thanks all, appreciate any guidance! Matt
Technical SEO | | MattWatts1 -
Does using data-href="" work more effectively than href="" rel="nofollow"?
I've been looking at some bigger enterprise sites and noticed some of them used HTML like this: <a <="" span="">data-href="http://www.otherodmain.com/" class="nofollow" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <a <="" span="">Instead of a regular href="" Does using data-href and some javascript help with shaping internal links, rather than just using a strict nofollow?</a>
Technical SEO | | JDatSB0 -
How do I add "noindex" or "nofollow" to a link in Wordpress
It's been a while since I've SEOed a Wordpress site. How do I add "nofollow" or "noindex" to specific links? I highlight the anchor text in the text editor, I click the "link" button. I could have sworn that there used to be an option in the dialogue box that pops up.
Technical SEO | | CsmBill0 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
Multiple urls for posting multiple classified ads
Want to optimize referral traffic while at same time keep search engines happy and the ads posted. Have a client who advertises on several classified ad sites around the globe. Which is better (post Panda), having multiple identical urls using canonicals to redirect juice to original url? For example: www.bluewidgets.com is the original www.bluewidgetsusa.com www.blue-widgets-galore.com Or, should the duplicate pages be directed to original using a 301? Currently using duplicate urls. Am currently not using "nofollow" tags on those pages.
Technical SEO | | AllIsWell0 -
How should I structure a site with multiple addresses to optimize for local search??
Here's the setup: We have a website, www.laptopmd.com, and we're ranking quite well in our geographic target area. The site is chock-full of local keywords, has the address properly marked up, html5 and schema.org compliant, near the top of the page, etc. It's all working quite well, but we're looking to expand to two more locations, and we're terrified that adding more addresses and playing with our current set-up will wreak havoc with our local search results, which we quite frankly currently rock. My question is 1)when it comes time to doing sub-pages for the new locations, should we strip the location information from the main site and put up local pages for each location in subfolders? 1a) should we use subdomains instead of subfolders to keep Google from becoming confused? Should we consider simply starting identically branded pages for the individual locations and hope that exact-match location-based urls will make up for the hit for duplicate content and will overcome the difficulty of building a brand from multiple pages? I've tried to look for examples of businesses that have tried to do what we're doing, but all the advice has been about organic search, which i already have the answer to. I haven't been able to really find a good example of a small business with multiple locations AND good rankings for each location. Should this serve as a warning to me?
Technical SEO | | LMDNYC0 -
Same Video on Multiple Pages and Sites... Duplicate Issues?
We're rolling out quite a bit of pro video and hosting on a 3-party platform/player (likely BrightCove) that also allows us to have the URL reside on our domain. Here is a scenario for a particular video asset: A. It's on a product page that the video is relevant for. B. We have an entry on our blog with the video C. We have a separate section of our site "Video Library" that provides a centralized view of all videos. It's there too. D. We eventually give the video to other sites (bloggers, industry educational sites etc) for outreach and link-building. A through C on our domain are all for user experience as every page is very relevant, but are there any duplicate video issues here? We would likely only have the transcript on the product page (though we're open to suggestions). Any related feedback would be appreciated. We want to make this scalable and done properly from the beginning (will be rolling out 1000+ videos in 2010)
Technical SEO | | SEOPA0