Metadata and duplicate content issues

[BGR]

Hi there: I'm seeing a steady decline in organic traffic, but at the same time and increase in pageviews and direct traffic. My site has about 3,000 crawl errors!! Errors are duplicate content, missing description tags, and description too long. Most of these issues are related to events that are being imported from Google calendars via ical and the pages created from these events. Should we block calendar events from being crawled by using the disallow directive in the robots.txt file? Here's the site: https://www.landmarkschool.org/

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Yes, of course you can keep running the calendar .

But you have to keep in mind somes pages will still appear in search results even when you has deleted those URL.

You can watch this video
Matt Cutts explains why a page that is disallowed in robots.txt may still appear in Google's search results.

On that case just to make sure, you can implement a 301 redirection.

This is going to be your second line defense. Just redirect all of those URLs to your home page.

There are many option to make a redirection. In my I'm case wordpress user so, whit a simple plugin I can resolve the problem in 5 minutes, in your case I have been checking your website and I have no idea which cms you are using.

Anyway you can use this app 301 Redirect Code Generator with many option available
PHP, JS, ASP, ASP.NET and of course APACHE (htaccess)

Now is the right moment to use the list that I mentioned in my first answer.
(2 - Create a list of all url that you want disable)

**So lets talk about your second question. **
Of course it will hurt your ranking, if you have 3020 index pages on google but just 20 of those pages are useful for the users you have a big problem.

A website should address any question or concern that a current or potential customer or client may have. If it doesn’t, the website is essentially useless.

with a simple divison 20 / 3020= 0.00625 less that 1% of your site is useful. So Im pretty sure that your rank has ben affected.

Dont forget mark my answer as a "GOOD ANSWER"  that will make me happy, and good luck.

[BGR]

Hi Roman: Thanks so much for your prompt reply. I agree that using robots.txt is the way to go. I do not want to disable the google calendar sync (we're a school and need our events to feed from several google calendars). I want to confirm that the robots.txt option will still work if the calendars are still syncing with the site.

One more question--do you think that all these errors are causing the dip in organic traffic?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

SOLUTION

1 - You have to disable the google calendar sync with your website
2 - Create a list of all url that you want disable
3 - At this point you have multiples option to block those URLs that you want to exclude from search engines.

So first lets define your problem

By blocking a URL on your site, you can stop Google from indexing that web page for display in Google Search results. In other words, people looking through Google Search results can't see or navigate to a blocked URL or its content.

If you have pages or other content that you don't want to appear in Google Search results, you can do this using a number of options:

• robots.txt files (Best Option)
• meta tags
• password-protection of web server files

In your case the option 2 will take a lot of time, why? beacuse you will have to manually add the "noindex" meta tag to each page, one by one....no make sense and the option 3 requires some server configurations and for me are little bit complex and time consuming at leats in my case, I would have to research on google, see some videos on Youtube and see what happen.

So firts option is the winner for me ....let see some example of how your robot.txt should look like.

1. The following example "/robots.txt" file specifies that no robots should visit any URL starting with "/events/january/" or "/tmp/", or /calendar.html:

<------------------------------START HERE------------------------------>

robots.txt for https://www.landmarkschool.org/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /events/january/ # This is an infinite virtual URL space
Disallow: /tmp/ # these will soon disappear
Disallow: /calendar.html
<------------------------------END HERE------------------------------>

FOR MORE INFO SEE THE VIDEO  > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40hlRN0paks