Duplicate Content Reports
-
Hi
Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ?
Cheers
Dan
-
Cool - Many thanks Kurt !
All Best
Dan
-
You don't absolutely have to do both, but by doing the parameter handling you are sending another signal to Google of what you want them to do (keep in mind that both canonical and parameters are only considered suggestions by Google). It's pretty simple to setup the parameter handling, so if you are really concerned about the duplicate content issues, why not do both?
Also, technically, the canonical tag tells Google which URL they've crawled to give prominence to when they are duplicate content, whereas my understanding is that parameter handling (when Google follows your suggestions) actually prevents Google from even crawling URLs with those parameters. In other words, canonical tags tell Google what to do with URLs they've crawled and parameter handling tells Google what URLs not to even crawl.
-
Thanks Kurt
and what about the parameter handling tool ? if canonical tag method you mention will deal with this then is there any need to do anything with parameter handling tool ?
cheers
dan
-
I would answer the same as Kurt for the install. You put the noindex tag in the header of the core page and so when all the other pages are generated with the parameters it will be added to those pages automatically. Once you get the pages out of the index, then I would nofollow links or use robots.txt to those pages to keep the bots out to start with.
-
Hi Dan,
I mean both. The canonical tag will help with duplicate content issues and the parameter handling will help with indexing.
Setting up the canonical tag shouldn't be an issue. If the same page content is being displayed and the only difference is that the URL has some parameters in it, then the canonical tag should naturally be included with the rest of the page's code. Since the canonical tag doesn't change, it should work perfectly.
For example, if you have a page, login.php, and that page always has a parameter, ?visitor=### (where ### is a random number), then you simply put the canonical tag in the head of the login.php page (). That canonical tag will always be in the login.php page no matter whether the URL is login.php?visitor=123 or login.php?visitor=56, etc. It will always tell the search engines that the original page login.php.
-
Thanks Clever PHD
So is there a way of setting a general rule to apply noindex to all of these duplicates or do you mean to the main actual sign in/login pages which will hence apply to all new, sessions specific, duplicate versions of the main sign-in/log-in pages etc when generated ?
Cheers
Dan
-
HI Kurt
Do you mean both or one or the other ?
Isn't setting up canonical tags on all the possible dynamically generated login, sign up and registration type pages impossible e can you set up some sort of rule that applies to those unpredictable (since we dont know what they are until they are generated by a user session etc) pages ?
Cheers
Dan
-
You can also noindex those pages to simply take them out of the index and then later nofollow links to them.
-
You can use the parameter handling and setup canonical tags on the 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
-
How to fix HTTP/HTTPS duplicate content
I recently installed an SSL certificate on the site: https://libertywholesalesupply.com Moz is now reading thousands of duplicate content pages because it is reading both http and https. I set up the configuration in Magento to auto-redirect the base URL, created a permanent redirect for the URL in the SEO settings, and adjusted the canonical settings. What am I missing??
Technical SEO | | adamxj20 -
Duplicate content due to credit card testing
I recently launched a site - http://www.footballtriviaquestions.co.uk and the site uses Paypal. In order to test the PayPal functionality I set up a zapto.org domain via a permanent IP service that points directly to the computer I've written the website on. It appears that Google has now indexed the zapto.org website. Will this cause problems to my main website, as the zapto.org website will pretty much contain content that is an exact duplicate of what is held on the main website. I've looked in Google webmaster tools for the main website and it doesn't mention any duplicate content, but I'm currently not in the top 50 ranking for "football trivia questions' on Google despite SEOMoz ranking my home page with an A rating. The page does rank at position 16 in Yahoo and Bing. This seems odd to me, although I do have very few back links pointing to my site. If the duplicate content is likely to be causing me problems what would be the best way to knock the zapto.org results out of Google
Technical SEO | | ipr1010 -
Is duplicate content ok if its on LinkedIn?
Hey everyone, I am doing a duplicate content check using copyscape, and realized we have used a ton of the same content on LinkedIn as our website. Should we change the LinkedIn company page to be original? Or does it matter? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Errors - 7300 - Duplicate Page Content..Help me..
Hi, I just received the crawl report with 7300 errors of duplicate page content. Site built using php. list of errors will be like this.. http://xxxxx.com/channels/ http://xxxxx.com/channels/?page=1 http://xxxxxx.com/channels/?page=2 I am not good in coding and using readymade script for this website. could anyone guide me to fix this issue? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | vilambara0 -
An odd duplicate content issue...
Hi all, my developers have just assured me that nothing has changed form last week but in the today's crawl I see all the website duplicated: and the difference on the url is the '/' so basically the duplicated urls are: htts://blabla.bla/crop htts://blabla.bla/crop/ Any help in understanding why is much appreciated. thanks
Technical SEO | | LeadGenerator0 -
Duplicate content
I'm getting an error showing that two separate pages have duplicate content. The pages are: | Help System: Domain Registration Agreement - Registrar Register4Less, Inc. http://register4less.com/faq/cache/11.html 1 27 1 Help System: Domain Registration Agreement - Register4Less Reseller (Tucows) http://register4less.com/faq/cache/7.html | These are both registration agreements, one for us (Register4Less, Inc.) as the registrar, and one for Tucows as the registrar. The pages are largely the same, but are in fact different. Is there a way to flag these pages as not being duplicate content? Thanks, Doug.
Technical SEO | | R4L0 -
Duplicate Content Caused By Blog Filters
We are getting some duplicate content warnings based on our blog. Canonical URL's can work for some of the pages, but most of the duplicate content is caused by blog posts appearing on more than 1 URL. What is the best way to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Marketpath0 -
Duplicate content question with PDF
Hi, I manage a property listing website which was recently revamped, but which has some on-site optimization weaknesses and issues. For each property listing like http://www.selectcaribbean.com/property/147.html there is an equivalent PDF version spidered by google. The page looks like this http://www.selectcaribbean.com/pdf1.php?pid=147 my question is: Can this create a duplicate content penalty? If yes, should I ban these pages from being spidered by google in the robots.txt or should I make these link nofollow?
Technical SEO | | multilang0