Blog Duplicate Content

[McTaggart]

Hi, I have a blog, and like most blogs I have various search options (subject matter, author, archive, etc) which produce the same content via different URLs.

Should I implement the rel-canonical tag AND the meta robots tag (noindex, follow) on every page of duplicate blog content, or simply choose one or the other? What's best practice?

Thanks Mozzers! Luke

[Dr-Pete]

When you say "duplicate blog content", do you mean that the paths are creating duplicate URLs for the post themselves, or for that the tags, categories, etc. have overlapping search results?

If it's the latter (more common), I'd generally NOINDEX those. They aren't really duplicates, and canonical isn't appropriate in most of those cases. Agreed with @Boomajoom, though, it does depend on how integral those paths are for search. Some people use tags as major category navigation and build links to them. For others, the tags are just secondary navigation.

If your paths are all creating different URLs for the individual blog post, definitely use rel-canonical on those. That's a problem, and they are true duplicates. I'd even advise seeing if you can not do that - it's just messy long-term, and the perceived usability benefits are very, very small in my experience. It's almost never worth having multiple URLs for the same final page.

[brandonjschwartz]

It depends. If you're getting traffic and links to your tag pages, then it wouldn't be worth it to de-index them. The general rule of thumb that I've followed is if I'm attracting traffic to tags or categories, I leave them in the index while adding canonical tags to individual post pages. But other people have other views and a lot of it is personal preference to how important those other pages are for you.