Magento Dublicate Content (Noindex and Rel"canonical")

[TogetherCare]

Hi All,

Just looking for some advice regarding my website on magento.

We by mistake didnt enable canonical tags and noindex tags so had a big problem with dublicate content from filter pages but also have URLs to Cats as Yes so this didnt help with not having canonical tags enabled.

We now have everything enabled for a few weeks now but dont see much drop in indexed pages in google. (currently 27k and we have only 5k products)

My question basically is how do we speed up noindexation of dublicate content and also would you change URL to cats as No so google just now sees the url to products? (my concerns with this is would leaving it to Yes help because it will hopefully read the canonical tags on products now)

Thank you in advance

Michael

[TogetherCare]

Hi Carson

Thank you for replying and the indepth answers.

I did read somewhere that dublicate content on your own website isnt too bad but im glad you have helped me clear things up.

So would you change cat urls to no or leave them to yes for now till google can see all the canoical tags on products?

Thanks

Mike

[Carson-Ward]

I think there's an underlying assumption here that duplicate content will harm your site, and that's not necessarily true. There's no "duplicate content penalty" - it's more than a filter. Google is better than most at recognizing this, especially with common CMS like Magento and WP. Google attempts to look at the links going to both pages and understand their authority together.

Duplicate content is more of an issue if you're pulling content that others are using as well, e.g. on product descriptions provided by manufacturers and other types of content. Google won't "penalize" you, but they will sometimes filter your site out in favor of the most authoritative site with that content. It's also an issue (mostly for Panda) if you're creating keyword pages that contain duplicate of even very-similar content just to rank for a bunch of very similar keywords.

So my first bit of advice is, "don't obsess over intra-site duplicate content."

That said, it's best to reduce and avoid duplicate content 1) for less-sophisticated search engine, 2) for the sake of your own analytics data integrity and simplicity, 3) just in case Google doesn't get it (very rare).

Set the categories up however you think is best for the user (generally just the product name without categories), double-check the canonical URLs, and wait for Google to catch up on the canonical and noindex. It can take many months depending on your site's authority, but it's unlikely to move the needle either way. Keep in mind that Google may keep pages in the index even if they are honoring the canonical tag - they'll just show the canonical version but keep both indexed. That's working as intended - don't worry about that