How to solve Parameter Issue causing Duplicate Content
-
Hi everyone,
My site home page comes up in SERP with following url www.sitename/?referer=indiagrid
My question is:-
Should I disallow using robots.txt.?
or 301 redirect to the home page
Other issue is
i have few dynamic generated URL's for a form
http://www.www.sitename/career-form.php?position=SEO Executive
I am using parameter "position" in URL Parameter in GWT.
But still my pages are indexed that is leading to duplicate page content.
Please help me out.
-
Thanks Tom.
SEOMOZ Community Rocks!
-
It will. It may take a bit of time for it do so, but they should drop relatively quickly. Google is very good at following the canonical directive.
-
Thanks Tom.
One more question,
Will Google drop the duplicate pages from its index after applying canonical tag.?
-
I agree, canonical urls are the way to go with this - unless of course you can draw them into unique urls without variables which may also solve the issue - though not entirely
-
Hi Himanshu
I would not use a 301 redirect or block with the robots.txt file as the dynamic query parameter (basically everything after the "?") may not work if you do that. Your CMS may depend on it, or you may be tracking certain things with the query in analytics (for instance, a client I've worked with uses queries to measure display ad performance). For this reason, I wouldn't redirect.
However, implementing a canonical tag on each page should stop Google indexing any dynamic URLs that are created, which will stop any duplicate content issue. For each page on your site, eg: www.sitename.com, www.sitename.com/page1.html, www.sitename.com/page2.html etc. - have a self-referring canonical tag on each one - basically, include a canonical tag that points to the page you are on. For each example above, that would be:
Get in touch with your dev team or whoever created the website to see if they can implement the tags site-wide. If you're running Wordpress, the Yoast SEO Plugin is a free tool that will do this for you.
Finally, take a look at the SEOMoz guide to canonicals - it's really helpful and will help to explain my points further.
Hope this 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
-
Duplicate content issue
Hi, A client of ours has one URL for the moment (https://aalst.mobilepoint.be/) and wants to create a second one with exactly the same content (https://deinze.mobilepoint.be/). Will that mean Google punishes the second one because of duplicate content? What are the recommendations?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Email and landing page duplicate content issue?
Hi Mozers, my question is, if there is a web based email that goes to subscribers, then if they click on a link it lands on a Wordpress page with very similar content, will Google penalize us for duplicate content? If so is the best workaround to make the email no index no follow? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane770 -
Duplicate content or an update ???
Buying Guide and Product Category page competing for the same keyword ? Got a “nuts and bold website” selling basic stuff. Imagine selling simple nuts, bolts and washers (the little ring that goes in between) in different metals. Imagine a website with a very wide and deep line of these simple products. For long tail keywords we rank well (Example: 0.25 inch bolts). For the keyword: “Nuts bolts” our main category page use to rank well low 1<sup>st</sup> page to second page up against the big guys (Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, some drug store who may have a mix pack of nuts and bolts, but still Google don’t see the difference and list 2 pages each for these guys). But then in mid-February there were an update and suddenly our “Buying guide for nuts and bolts” rank higher and started to compete with our own product category page. That was never our intention. These two pages now compete for the ranking on page 4<sup>th</sup>. Clearly there were more words on the buying guide page but no changes had been made to it for well months or years. To make up for it some more words were added to the category page, but of cause there is only so many way you can fraise words about “nuts and bolts” without sounding a bit duplicate/re-writing. So what do I do now ?? Clearly the product category page is the one we like to rank highest with the guide a close 2nd. Most customer don’t need the buying guide but it is good to have and great support as we got lot of good comments from customer who read it. Made a link to the buying guide from the category page and wise verses. The category page got an embedded video. Moz list the page authority for the category page to 16 and 1 for the buying guide but clearly G see it differently. Already tried to change the Meta Tag Title and Description a little but it is hard to do if the word “Nuts Bolts” is to appear in the description or people don’t know what to expect. Could just insert a “do not index” for the buying guide but not a good long term solution. Unfortunately I am out of imagination at this point. Any good suggestions ?? Thanks, Kim Any good suggestions ???
Technical SEO | | KimX0 -
404 and Duplicate Content.
I just submitted my first campaign. And it's coming up with a LOT of errors. Many of them I feel are out of my control as we use a CMS for RV dealerships. But I have a couple of questions. I got a 404 error and SEO Moz tells me the link, but won't tell me where that link originated from, so I don't know where to go to fix it. I also got a lot of duplicate content, and it seems a lot of them are coming from "tags" on my blog. Is that something I should be concerned about? I will have a lot more question probably as I'm new to using this tool Thanks for the responses! -Brandon here is my site: floridaoutdoorsrv.com I welcome any advice or input!
Technical SEO | | floridaoutdoorsrv0 -
Duplicate Homepage issue
SEOMOZ says my site has two homepages: www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/ When you go to "www.mysite.com/" the URL changes to "www.mysite.com" Why is this happening and what can I do about it?
Technical SEO | | LucasF0 -
Duplicate homepage content
Hi, I recently did a site crawl using seomoz crawl test My homepage seems to have 3 cases of duplicate content.. These are the urls www.example.ie/ www.example..ie/%5B%7E19%7E%5D www.example..ie/index.htm Does anyone have any advise on this? What impact does this have on my seo?
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
CGI Parameters: should we worry about duplicate content?
Hi, My question is directed to CGI Parameters. I was able to dig up a bit of content on this but I want to make sure I understand the concept of CGI parameters and how they can affect indexing pages. Here are two pages: No CGI parameter appended to end of the URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/world/asia/13japan.html CGI parameter appended to the end of the URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/world/asia/13japan.html?pagewanted=2&ref=homepage&src=mv Questions: Can we safely say that CGI parameters = URL parameters that append to the end of a URL? Or are they different? And given that you have rel canonical implemented correctly on your pages, search engines will move ahead and index only the URL that is specified in that tag? Thanks in advance for giving your insights. Look forward to your response. Best regards, Jackson
Technical SEO | | jackson_lo0 -
Is this considered as duplicate content?
One of my clients has a template page they have used repeatedly each time they have a new news item. The template includes a two-paragraph customer quote/testimonial for the company. So, they now have 100+ pages with the same customer quote. The rest of the page content / body copy is unique. Is there any likelihood of this being considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110