Duplicate Content for Locations on my Directory Site
-
I have a pretty big directory site using Wordpress with lots of "locations", "features", "listing-category" etc....
Duplicate Content:
https://www.thecbd.co/location/california/
https://www.thecbd.co/location/canada/
referring URL is www.thecbd.co
is it a matter of just putting a canonical URL on each location, or just on the main page?
Would this be the correct code to put:
on the main page?
Thanks Everyone!
-
Hi Kay,
These two example URLs do not seem to represent duplicate content - the listings are different for each page. I wouldn't want to set canonical tags on these pages as they are unique.
Did you see an error in an SEO tool of some kind indicating there was a duplicate content problem here?
For general applications, canonical tags should be added to the duplicate page(s) themselves, and those canonical tags should refer to the preferred/canonical page that you want to keep indexed (but no changes need to be made to the preferred/canonical page itself). So if these pages were true duplicates of your homepage, each duplicate would need the canonical tag (but the homepage itself would not need to include the canonical tag).
From your examples, I'd just caution you may not be dealing with actual duplicate content - they look like valid pages to me.
Best,
Mike
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
-
Recurring events and duplicate content
Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | | megan.helmer0 -
Should I nofollow Geo-located links on a site?
I run various sites that use Geo-location to place related links in navigation menus on a page. For example, if you land on the home page, we will see that you are in Florida and then in one of the content boxes on the page, show job listings that this site has in Florida. We also give the option to search for other jobs or use other navigation options. The idea is to try to help the user along the best we can, but ..... What opinions do persons have here on if these links should be nofollowed as GoogleBot will always see links to places in California etc. - wherever Googlebot is crawling from? Would this then be confusing as we are a site that focused on the entire US and not just California etc Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
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 for our Advertising Sites Showing in Search Results
Hello, My company has a couple different sites (Magento Stores) for Organic, Adwords and AdCenter purposes.They are mirror sites of each except for phone number, contact form, ect. Here is our organic site: http://www.oxygenconcnetratorstore.com/ Adwords and Adcenter site respectively: http://www.oxygenconcnetratorstore.com/portable/
Technical SEO | | chuck-layton
http://www.oxygenconcnetratorstore.com/oxygen/ The problem is, both the Adwords and AdCenter stores appear in Google SERP when you put in the exact URL. I have "noindex/nofollow" tag on both the advertising sites but they are still showing in search results. I feel we are getting hurt for basically have 3 sites of duplicate content. Is there a reason why the sites would be showing in search results even with the nofollow/index tags?? Any help would be awesome. Thanks. seomoz.jpg0 -
Duplicate content - wordpress image attachement
I have run my seomoz campaign through my wordpress site and found duplicate content. However, all of this duplicate content was either my logo or images and no content with addresses like /?attachement_id=4 for example . How should I resolve this? thank you.
Technical SEO | | htmanage0 -
Cross-domain duplicate content issue
Hey all, Just double-checking something. Here's the issue, briefly. One of my clients is a large law firm. The firm has a main site, and an additional site for an office in Atlanta. On the main site, there is a list of all attorneys and links to their profiles (that they wrote themselves). The Atlanta site has this as well, but lists only the attorneys located in that office. I would like to have the profiles for the Atlanta lawyers on both sites. Would rel=canonical work to avoid a dupe-content smackdown? The profiles should rank for Atlanta over the main site. This just means that G will drop the main site's profiles (for those attorneys) from their index, correct? No other weird side effects? I hope I worded all that clearly!
Technical SEO | | LCNetwork0 -
The Bible and Duplicate Content
We have our complete set of scriptures online, including the Bible at http://lds.org/scriptures. Users can browse to any of the volumes of scriptures. We've improved the user experience by allowing users to link to specific verses in context which will scroll to and highlight the linked verse. However, this creates a significant amount of duplicate content. For example, these links: http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5-10 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1 All of those will link to the same chapter in the book of James, yet the first two will highlight the verse 5 and verses 5-10 respectively. This is a good user experience because in other sections of our site and on blogs throughout the world webmasters link to specific verses so the reader can see the verse in context of the rest of the chapter. Another bible site has separate html pages for each verse individually and tends to outrank us because of this (and possibly some other reasons) for long tail chapter/verse queries. However, our tests indicated that the current version is preferred by users. We have a sitemap ready to publish which includes a URL for every chapter/verse. We hope this will improve indexing of some of the more popular verses. However, Googlebot is going to see some duplicate content as it crawls that sitemap! So the question is: is the sitemap a good idea realizing that we can't revert back to including each chapter/verse on its own unique page? We are also going to recommend that we create unique titles for each of the verses and pass a portion of the text from the verse into the meta description. Will this perhaps be enough to satisfy Googlebot that the pages are in fact unique? They certainly are from a user perspective. Thanks all for taking the time!
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0 -
CGI Parameters: should we worry about duplicate content?
Hi, My question is directed to CGI Parameters. I was able to dig up a bit of content on this but I want to make sure I understand the concept of CGI parameters and how they can affect indexing pages. Here are two pages: No CGI parameter appended to end of the URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/world/asia/13japan.html CGI parameter appended to the end of the URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/world/asia/13japan.html?pagewanted=2&ref=homepage&src=mv Questions: Can we safely say that CGI parameters = URL parameters that append to the end of a URL? Or are they different? And given that you have rel canonical implemented correctly on your pages, search engines will move ahead and index only the URL that is specified in that tag? Thanks in advance for giving your insights. Look forward to your response. Best regards, Jackson
Technical SEO | | jackson_lo0