Duplicate URL Parameters for Blog Articles
-
Hi there,
I'm working on a site which is using parameter URLs for category pages that list blog articles.
The content on these pages constantly change as new posts are frequently added, the category maybe for 'Heath Articles' and list 10 blog posts (snippets from the blog). The URL could appear like so with filtering:
-
www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general
-
www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016
-
www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=1
-
All pages currently have the same Meta title and descriptions due to limitations with the CMS, they are also not in our xml sitemap
I don't believe we should be focusing on ranking for these pages as the content on here are from blog posts (which we do want to rank for on the individual post) but there are 3000 duplicates and they need to be fixed.
Below are the options we have so far:
Canonical URLs
Have all parameter pages within the category canonicalize to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general and generate dynamic page titles (I know its a good idea to use parameter pages in canonical URLs).
WMT Parameter tool
Tell Google all extra parameter tags belong to the main pages (e.g. www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=3 belongs to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general).
Noindex
Remove all the blog category pages, I don't know how Google would react if we were to remove 3000 pages from our index (we have roughly 1700 unique pages)
We are very limited with what we can do to these pages, if anyone has any feedback suggestions it would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
-
-
Hard to say these days if they do respect the scroll effect there unfortunately.
-
Thanks Martijn,
That sounds like a good idea, we were also considering a Javascript loading option where we remove the pagination and load content on scroll - I am still 50/50 whether or not hidden content like this is crawled or ignored.
-
Thanks Anthony,
We are using rel=prev/next on the pagination for these blog pages which does reduce duplication, but because of the parameter filters we still have thousands of duplicates.
That's a good point about the indexing of older blogs!
-
I would simply set up rel=next/prev on the paginated series and not so much worry about duplicate title tags or using canonical tags. You want to make sure Google continues to crawl deep into your blog pagination and can access older blog posts.
-
Hi,
What I would do is go with both the canonical URLs as the Google Search Console parameters, in order to make sure first that the pages won't be seen as duplicates with the canonical URLs and in addition to that you might want to make sure that Google isn't visiting these pages at all in order to save your crawl budget for the more important pages on your site.
Martijn.
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
-
Same URL-Structure & the same number of URLs indexed on two different websites - can it lead to a Google penalty?
Hey guys. I've got a question about the url structure on two different websites with a similar topic (bith are job search websites). Although we are going to publish different content (texts) on these two websites and they will differ visually, the url structure (except for the domain name) remains exactly the same, as does the number of indexed landingpages on both pages. For example, www.yyy.com/jobs/mobile-developer & www.zzz.com/jobs/mobile-developer. In your opinion, can this lead to a Google penalty? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vde130 -
Re-direct Irrelevant (high ranking) blog articles?
One of our sites has some old & completely irrelvant blog articles that are high ranking & receive the top two visited pages for the entire site (more page views than the homepage even). Our marketing managers are wanting to take down the blog posts since they are falsely inflating their traffic numbers with irrelevant visitors. I'm concerned by taking them down and re-directing to another site it will affect our overall domain authority and rankings for relevant keywords. Thoughts and/or resources on taking down vs. keeping up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mfcb0 -
URL Parameters as a single solution vs Canonical tags
Hi all, We are running a classifieds platform in Spain (mercadonline.es) that has a lot of duplicate content. The majority of our duplicate content consists of URL's that contain site parameters. In other words, they are the result of multiple pages within the same subcategory, that are sorted by different field names like price and type of ad. I believe if I assign the correct group of url's to each parameter in Google webmastertools then a lot these duplicate issues will be resolved. Still a few questions remain: Once I set f.ex. the 'page' parameter and i choose 'paginates' as a behaviour, will I let Googlebot decide whether to index these pages or do i set them to 'no'? Since I told Google Webmaster what type of URL's contain this parameter, it will know that these are relevant pages, yet not always completely different in content. Other url's that contain 'sortby' don't differ in content at all so i set these to 'sorting' as behaviour and set them to 'no' for google crawling. What parameter can I use to assign this to 'search' I.e. the parameter that causes the URL's to contain an internal search string. Since this search parameter changes all the time depending on the user input, how can I choose the best one. I think I need 'specifies'? Do I still need to assign canonical tags for all of these url's after this process or is setting parameters in my case an alternative solution to this problem? I can send examples of the duplicates. But most of them contain 'page', 'descending' 'sort by' etc values. Thank you for your help. Ivor
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
Is it worth removing date from Blog Posts / Articles
Wondering, is it worth to remove date from articles from seo perspective. Am sure, Google search algorithm would like demote a post written a year back, as against an article on the same post (unless a year old post has very strong Authoritative links) May be it can turn out a bad user experience of removing dates, but if can hide date using Javascripts so as to show it as image to user and hide it from search engines, is it a good idea !!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Company Blog at a different URL
Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc. However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect. This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically. Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components. Last week, I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice. However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy. Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this. Any ideas? Other recommendations appreciated as well! Platinum-CCTV(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PTCCTV0 -
Linking to urls with Query Parameters good for SEO?
Hey guys, I am currently buying link ad spots on sites (hardcoded, not using ad networks). I track the each link I buy and the sales they generate with query parameters such as : http://www.mydomain.com/?r=top_menu_nav_on_seomoz My question is : do these links still pass link juice? I have my canonical already set to http://www.mydomain.com Also, in Webmaster tools I have it set to ignore anything after /?r= The way I see it, a link is a link. Naturally I would prefer to send directly to my root domain, however, these links cost a lot of money and I like to track my results. Does anyone have experience with SEO and working with query parameters?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrakJason0 -
I need some blogging advice please!
My name is Matthew and I am a new PRO member and founder of my own Internet marketing company in KS. So far I love the interaction and tools and functionality of seomoz. I am a true student of seo and love the subject. My dilemma is I know a blog is an important piece of any good seo campaign but I know very little about HOW to blog well......this is my new site and blog page. I only have a couple articles so far but many more planned. http://sawwebmarketing.com/seo-blog/ When I read an article that would be particuarly beneficial for my visitors can i post or share that on MY blog (giving the author the credit of course) without google thinking its duplicate content? is there anything specific I need to do with my blog for google to "see" the new, fresh content that is being added to the site? I have seen "tagged" items at the bottom of some blogs. Is this important? Some blogs will have a word or string of 2-3 words that are a link to a specific website. Does this help me or just them or just people reading the blog? **All I know is articles I write need to be relevant to my site and interesting and ORIGINAL and of benefit to my site visitors. ** Any advice that would help insure my blog articles get me all the juice they can would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you in advance! Matthew ps - my site only went live a couple days ago so I am still working on a few onpage items but ANY feedback about the site itself would be spectacular! Have a GREAT weekend!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mrupp440 -
Duplicate content
I have just read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world and I would like to know which option is the best fit for my case. I have the website http://www.hotelelgreco.gr and every image in image library http://www.hotelelgreco.gr/image-library.aspx has a different url but is considered duplicate with others of the library. Please suggest me what should i do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socrateskirtsios0