Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
-
If so how bad?
We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues.
We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all.
Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings.
Before I do, can you give me some advice around this?
Thanks,
Daniel. -
Thanks David, at this stage I have set up site to no index follow tag pages. Thanks for blog usability feedback. Related posts is next on the list of to do for the blog.
-
I don't think standard tags get used much by visitors. Related posts, especially if acompanied by thumbnail images, perform much better in my experience.
-
Ok thanks guys, at this stage I think this is the way I'll go or as David says just use them to organise content and not display them.
Has anyone else found anything out there, articles, videos, anything on Moz that says Google is smart enough to deal with this so it is a non issue.
Also any thoughts on how important blog tags are these days for usability?
-
Agree 100% with David and Fredrico. Noindex, follow your tag pages.
-
Had the same issue myself, constant duplicate content reported on tag pages as sometimes some tag could have the same content on a page (while paginated).
We decided to no-index the tag pages, not only for the duplicate content issue, but also, they do not provide any extra to search engines, they are intended for users, then why have search engines indexing them? We added a no-index but NOT a nofollow as we WANT the pages they link to to be indexed (posts).
Sure, we lost about 7K indexed pages, but now those that remain are actually then ones that deserve to be there.
I'm with David on this one.
-
If you're using tags internally to help organise content, you could just stop them from appearing on the front end of the site.
The alternative is to keep them on the front end, but to no-index the tag pages.
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
-
Changing title tags - any potential issues?
Hello all, I am planning to change the title tags throughout a site and am vaguely aware (perhaps wrongly!) that changing title tags across a site is a risk factor - can be a spam flag if changes (to a specific title tag) are implemented too regularly, for example. Would you change title tags across a site in one go, or implement changes gradually - to avoid any risk of upsetting Google. Do you have any insights/tips on the implementation of title tag changes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Mobile Canonical Tag Issue
Hey so, For our site
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul562
we have the desktop version: www.site.com/product-name/product-code/ The mobile version www.site.com/mobile/product-name/product-code So...on the desktop version we'd have the following.. | | Now my question is, what do we do as far as canonicals on the actual mobile URL? Would it be this? | |
| | OR are we NOT supposed to have mobile canonical tags whatsoever since we've already added "rel alternate" ? Would like some clarificaiton. | | |0 -
Internal Duplicate Content Question...
We are looking for an internal duplicate content checker that is capable of crawling a site that has over 300,000 pages. We have looked over Moz's duplicate content tool and it seems like it is somewhat limited in how deep it crawls. Are there any suggestions on the best "internal" duplicate content checker that crawls deep in a site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson091 -
Product descriptions & Duplicate Content: between fears and reality
Hello everybody, I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc). What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site... what do you think? Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ? Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Can videos be considered duplicate content?
I have a page that ranks 5 and to get a rich snippet I'm thinking of adding a relevant video to the page. Thing is, the video is already on another page which ranks for this keyword... but only at position 20. As it happens the page the video is on is the more important page for other keywords, so I won't remove it. Will having the same video on two pages be considered a duplicate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Http and https duplicate content?
Hello, This is a quick one or two. 🙂 If I have a page accessible on http and https count as duplicate content? What about external links pointing to my website to the http or https page. Regards, Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
Duplicate Content Question
My understanding of duplicate content is that if two pages are identical, Google selects one for it's results... I have a client that is literally sharing content real-time with a partner...the page content is identical for both sites, and if you update one page, teh otehr is updated automatically. Obviously this is a clear cut case for canonical link tags, but I'm cuious about something: Both sites seem to show up in search results but for different keywords...I would think one domain would simply win out over the other, but Google seems to show both sites in results. Any idea why? Also, could this duplicate content issue be hurting visibility for both sites? In other words, can I expect a boost in rankings with the canonical tags in place? Or will rankings remain the same?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0 -
Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc1