Duplicate Content and Canonical use
-
We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications.
Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course.
Cheers
Martin
-
The developer now claims that including a mon_page attribute (1&mon_page=1) within the URL will let Google know how our archiving system works and, thus, prevent us from being penalised for duplications. Any help is greatly appreciated. Trouble finding info on this.
-
If the articles are also featured on individual pages I would recommend NOINDEX for 2 of those pages, and a canonical tag for the correct page.
-
I can't see how letting Google know through the use of canonical tags which is the predominant page to look at, is going to have any impact on your SEO, other than a positive one. Remember that in doing this you are making positive changes.
As Theo mentioned above, you can also 301 two of the pages you dont want indexed as well.
Good luck,
Andy
-
I think the canonical tag would do quite well in this case, though you want want to consider a 301 redirect first. Both would require you to decide which URL is the 'main' one though, and either add a canonical tag with that URL to the other pages, or have the other pages 301 to the main one.
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
-
Should I keep writing about the same using rel canonical?
Hi, The service we provide has not so many searches per month. A long tail keyword that describes the service well has at the most 400 searches per month. We wrote a post for this keyword and we ranked number 1 for many months. Now we're on page 2 and I the truth is we stopped writing blog posts because we were raking well for our best keywords. I added a few new posts and lost ranking on my top keywords so I gave up, deleted them and recover the rankings for the keywords I wanted the most. The problem is that I have lost these positions and I know we're supposed to be updating the blog regularly. What would you suggest? Should we keep writing about the same thing and use rel canonical? There aren't that many keywords related to what we offer. I appreciate any ideas.
Technical SEO | | Naix0 -
Issue with duplicate content
Hello guys, i have a question about duplicate content. Recently I noticed that MOZ's system reports a lot of duplicate content on one of my sites. I'm a little confused what i should do with that because this content is created automatically. All the duplicate content comes from subdomain of my site where we actually share cool images with people. This subdomain is actually pointing to our Tumblr blog where people re-blog our posts and images a lot. I'm really confused how all this duplicate content is created and what i should do to prevent it. Please tell me whether i need to "noindex", "nofollow" that subdomain or you can suggest something better to resolve that issue. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
Tags, Categories, & Duplicate Content
Looking for some advice on a duplicate content issue that we're having that definitely isn't unique to us. See, we are allowing all our tag and category pages, as well as our blog pagination be indexed and followed, but Moz is detecting that all as duplicate content, which is obvious since it is the same content that is on our blog posts. We've decided in the past to keep these pages the way they are as it hasn't seemed to hurt us specifically and we hoped it would help our overall ranking. We haven't seen positive or negative signals either way, just the warnings from Moz. We are wondering if we should noindex these pages and if that could cause a positive change, but we're worried it might cause a big negative change as well. Have you confronted this issue? What did you decide and what were the results? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | bradhodson0 -
Duplicate content warning for a hierarchy structure?
I have a series of pages on my website organized in a hierarchy, let's simplify it to say parent pages and child pages. Each of the child pages has product listings, and an introduction at the top (along with an image) explaining their importance, why they're grouped together, providing related information, etc.
Technical SEO | | westsaddle
The parent page has a list of all of its child pages and a copy of their introductions next to the child page's title and image thumbnail. Moz is throwing up duplicate content warnings for all of these pages. Is this an actual SEO issue, or is the warning being overzealous?
Each child page has tons of its own content, and each parent page has the introductions from a bunch of child pages, so any single introduction is never the only content on the page. Thanks in advance!0 -
Would Google Call These Pages Duplicate Content?
Our Web store, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/index.html, has struggled with duplicate content issues for some time. One aspect of duplicate content is a page like this: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html. When an audio book title goes out-of-publication we keep the page at our store and display a http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html whenever a visitor attempts to visit a specific title that is OOP. There are several thousand OOP pages. Would Google consider these OOP pages duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | lbohen0 -
Duplicate Content?
My site has been archiving our newsletters since 2001. It's been helpful because our site visitors can search a database for ideas from those newsletters. (There are hundreds of pages with similar titles: archive1-Jan2000, archive2-feb2000, archive3-mar2000, etc.) But, I see they are being marked as "similar content." Even though the actual page content is not the same. Could this adversely affect SEO? And if so, how can I correct it? Would a separate folder of archived pages with a "nofollow robot" solve this issue? And would my site visitors still be able to search within the site with a nofollow robot?
Technical SEO | | sakeith0 -
Duplicate content error from url generated
We are getting a duplicate content error, with "online form/" being returned numerous times. Upon inspecting the code, we are calling an input form via jQuery which is initially called by something like this: Opens Form Why would this be causing it the amend the URL and to be crawled?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0