Masses (5,168 issues found) of Duplicate content.

[Metropolis]

Hi Mozzers,

I have a site that has returned 5,168 issues with duplicate content.

Where would you start?

I started sorting via High page Authority first the highest being 28 all the way down to 1. I did want to use the rel=canonical tag as the site has many redirects already.

The duplicates are caused by various category and cross category pages and search results  such as ....page/1?show=2&sort=rand.

I was thinking of going down the lines of a URL rewrite and changing the search anyway. Is it work redirecting everything in terms of results versus the effort of changing all the 5,168 issues?

Thanks

sm

[Metropolis]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the responses I'm going to have a look at the issue again, with your suggestions in mind. And I'll keep you posted. Thanks again.

[Dr-Pete]

Don't look at individual URLs - at the scale of 5K plus, look at your site architecture and what kind of variants you're creating. For example, if you know that the show= and sort= parameter are a possible issue, you could go to Google and enter something like:

site:example.com inurl:show=

(warning: it will return pages with the word "show" in the URL, like "example.com/show-times" - not usually an issue, but it can be on rare occasion).

That'll give you a sense of how many cases that one parameter is creating. Odds are, you'll find a couple that are causing 500+ of the 5K duplicates, so start with those.

Search pagination is very tricky - you could canonicalize to "View All" as Chris Hill said, you could NOINDEX pages 2+, or you could try Google's new (but very complicated way):

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Problem is, that doesn't work on Bing and it's pretty easy to mess up.

The rel-canonical tag can scoop up sorts pretty well. You can also tell Google in Google Webmaster Tools what those parameters do, and whether to index them, but I've had mixed luck with that. If you're not having any serious problems, GWT is easy and worth a shot.

[ChrisHillfd]

Have a look at your pagination too. If you've not got a 'show all' link it might be worth putting one in and making that the canonical. Should eliminate some of your duplicate content issues.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

Last I came accross such an issue I mostly started with making the 'easy' changes that reduced the number the most.

In the last case, it was implimenting a 301 to the www version of the site (cutting the errors in half) and putting a canonical on one search page.

This got the number down to the point where it was easyer to make decisions on 'Is it worth making friendlyer urls' and discover more intresting places dup content was being generated.

It's one of these things I would always aim for 0 where I can. It usualy means that the url or site structure can be improved sugnificantly, or it's such an easy fix that it's hard to justify not doing.

[Highland]

If it really is a URL issue then you should just be able to easily canonical the root pages and the rest should sort itself out. Start there and let the next spidering tell you where you stand.