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
-
Since it is a duplicate and meant for mobile devices, then yes, I would use a canonical tag or even noindex if you don't want it in the index anyway. Either method would eliminate the duplicate content problem.
-
The page content is the exact same, the the layout is built for a mobile device. So in essence we don't know why it would be indexed, unless that happens for mobile browsing pages...
So the solution is to put a rel-canonical tag on that trailing parameter page to prevent duplicate content.
-
Is the page with device=iphone&c=y different than example.html? If not, you should make sure to add the canonical tag to it. If it is different, then you shouldn't add it because it's not a duplicate.
-
Hi Steve,
Another thing I came across... a page with trailing parameters like ?device=iphone&c=y is rendering a different set of code. So we have the original page with the content, and then we have www.example.html?device=iphone&c=y. The one with the trailing parameter doesn't have a canonical tag attached to it, but it's indexed in Google (when we search the www.example.html URL) it shows up as number two.
Do you have any insights into this? Will this be a duplicate content issue?
Thanks!
Jackson
-
Thank you Steve for your response. I had come across Dr. Pete's post in the past but forgot about it. Nonetheless, the CGI parameter explanation and the use of canonical tags answers my question.
Jackson
-
Yes, you can say CGI parameters = URL parameters. I don't think many people refer to them as CGI parameters anymore though.
To answer your question, yes, as long as you have rel canonical set up correctly, then the URL parameters won't hurt your indexing.
For example, if you have your rel canonical set to http://mysite.com/japan.html
Then, only that page will be indexed, even if there are various parameters such as
http://mysite.com/japan.html?source=something&whateva=somethingelse
Just MAKE SURE to setup rel canonical correctly because it can be bad if you don't. Check out Dr. Pete's post about this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization
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
-
Duplicate content issue on Magento platform
We have a lot of duplicate pages (600 urls) on our site (total urls 800) built on the Magento e-commerce platform. We have the same products in a number of different categories that make it easy for people to choose which product suits their needs. If we enable the canonical fix in Magento will it dramatically reduce the number of pages that are indexed. Surely with more pages indexed (even though they are duplicates) we get more search results visibility. I'm new to this particular SEO issue. What do the SEO community have to say on this matter. Do we go ahead with the canonical fix or leave it?
Technical SEO | | PeterDavies0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles from Weebly Blog
Anyone familiar with Weebly that can offer some suggestions? I ran a crawl diagnostics on my site and have some high priority issues that appear to stem from Weebly Blog posts. There are several of them and it appears that the post is being counted as "page content" on the main blog feed and then again when it is tagged to a category. I hope this makes sense, I am new to SEO and this is really confusing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CRMI0 -
How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
Hi, I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind: -Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size -Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website. Looking forward to your opinions and solutions. Jeroen
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
Subdomain Severe Duplicate Content Issue
Hi A subdomain for our admin site has been indexed and it has caused over 2000 instances of duplicate content. To fix this issue, is a 301 redirect or canoncial tag the best option? http://www.example.com/services http://admin.example.com/services Really appreciate your advice J
Technical SEO | | Metricly-Marketing0 -
Development Website Duplicate Content Issue
Hi, We launched a client's website around 7th January 2013 (http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk), we originally constructed the website on a development domain (http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk) which was active for around 6-8 months (the dev site was unblocked from search engines for the first 3-4 months, but then blocked again) before we migrated dev --> live. In late Jan 2013 changed the robots.txt file to allow search engines to index the website. A week later I accidentally logged into the DEV website and also changed the robots.txt file to allow the search engines to index it. This obviously caused a duplicate content issue as both sites were identical. I realised what I had done a couple of days later and blocked the dev site from the search engines with the robots.txt file. Most of the pages from the dev site had been de-indexed from Google apart from 3, the home page (dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk, and two blog pages). The live site has 184 pages indexed in Google. So I thought the last 3 dev pages would disappear after a few weeks. I checked back late February and the 3 dev site pages were still indexed in Google. I decided to 301 redirect the dev site to the live site to tell Google to rank the live site and to ignore the dev site content. I also checked the robots.txt file on the dev site and this was blocking search engines too. But still the dev site is being found in Google wherever the live site should be found. When I do find the dev site in Google it displays this; Roller Banners Cheap » admin dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/ A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. This is really affecting our clients SEO plan and we can't seem to remove the dev site or rank the live site in Google. In GWT I have tried to remove the sub domain. When I visit remove URLs, I enter dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk but then it displays the URL as http://www.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk. I want to remove a sub domain not a page. Can anyone help please?
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
Good afternoon. I've tried searching for an answer to the following question but I believe my circumstance is a little different than what has been asked in the past. I currently run a Australian website targeted at a specific demographic (50-75) and we produce a LARGE number of articles on a wide variety of lifestyle segments. All of our focus up until now has been in Australia and our SEO and language is dedicated towards this. The next logical step in my mind is to launch a mirror website targeted at the US market. This website would be a simple mirror of a large number of articles (1000+) on subjects such as Food, Health, Travel, Money and Technology. Our current CMS has no problems in duplicating the specific items over and sharing everything, the problem is in the fact that we currently use a .com.au domain and the .com domain in unavailable and not for sale, which would mean we have to create a new name for the US targeted domain. The question is, how will mirroring this information, targeted towards US, affect us on Google and would we better off getting a large number of these articles 're-written' by a company on freelancer.com etc? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Geelong
Drew0 -
Are RSS Feeds deemed duplicate content?
If a website content management system includes built-in feeds of different categories that the client can choose from, does that endanger them of having duplicate content if their categories are the same as another client's feed? These feeds appear on templated home page designs by default. Just trying to figure out how big of an issue these feeds are in terms of duplicate content across clients' sites. Should I be concerned? Obviously, there's other content on the home page besides the feed and have not really seen negative effects, but could it be impacting results?
Technical SEO | | KyleNeuberger0 -
Duplicate Content Home Page
Hello, I am getting Duplicate Content warning from SEOMoz for my home page: http://www.teacherprose.com http://www.teacherprose.com/index html I tried code below in .htaccess: redirect 301 /index.html http://www.teacherprose.com This caused error "too many re-directs" in browser Any thoughts? Thank You, Eric
Technical SEO | | monthelie10