How to prevent duplicate content within this complex website?

[StevenvanVessum]

I have a complex SEO issue I've been wrestling with and I'd appreciate your views on this very much. I have a sports website and most visitors are looking for the games that are played in the current week (I've studied this - it's true). We're creating a new website from scratch and I want to do this is as best as possible. We want to use the most elegant and best way to do this. We do not want to use work-arounds such as iframes, hiding text using AJAX etc. We need a solid solution for both users and search engines.

Therefor I have written down three options:

1. Using a canonical URL;
2. Using 301-redirects;
3. Using 302-redirects.

Introduction

The page 'website.com/competition/season/week-8' shows the soccer games that are played in game week 8 of the season. The next week users are interested in the games that are played in that week (game week 9). So the content a visitor is interested in, is constantly shifting because of the way competitions and tournaments are organized. After a season the same goes for the season of course.

The website we're building has the following structure:

• Competition (e.g. 'premier league')
  • Season (e.g. '2011-2012')
    • Playweek (e.g. 'week 8')
      • Game (e.g. 'Manchester United - Arsenal')

This is the most logical structure one can think of. This is what users expect.

Now we're facing the following challenge: when a user goes to http://website.com/premier-league he expects to see a) the games that are played in the current week and b) the current standings. When someone goes to http://website.com/premier-league/2011-2012/ he expects to see the same: the games that are played in the current week and the current standings. When someone goes to http://website.com/premier-league/2011-2012/week-8/ he expects to the same: the games that are played in the current week and the current standings.

So essentially there's three places, within every active season within a competition, within the website where logically the same information has to be shown.

To deal with this from a UX and SEO perspective, we have the following options:

Option A - Use a canonical URL

Using a canonical URL could solve this problem. You could use a canonical URL from the current week page and the Season page to the competition page:

So:

• the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season/playweek-8' would have a canonical tag that points to 'website.com/$competition/'
• the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season/' would have a canonical tag that points to 'website.com/$competition/'

The next week however, you want to have the canonical tag on 'website.com/$competition/$season/playweek-9' and the canonical tag from 'website.com/$competition/$season/playweek-8' should be removed.

So then you have:

• the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season/playweek-9' would have a canonical tag that points to 'website.com/$competition/'
• the page on 'website.com/$competition/$season/' would still have a canonical tag that points to 'website.com/$competition/'

In essence the canonical tag is constantly traveling through the pages.

Advantages:

• UX: for a user this is a very neat solution. Wherever a user goes, he sees the information he expects. So that's all good.
• SEO: the search engines get very clear guidelines as to how the website functions and we prevent duplicate content.

Disavantages:

• I have some concerns regarding the weekly changing canonical tag from a SEO perspective. Every week, within every competition the canonical tags are updated. How often do Search Engines update their index for canonical tags? I mean, say it takes a Search Engine a week to visit a page, crawl a page and process a canonical tag correctly, then the Search Engines will be a week behind on figuring out the actual structure of the hierarchy. On top of that: what do the changing canonical URLs to the 'quality' of the website? In theory this should be working all but I have some reservations on this.
• If there is a canonical tag from 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-8', what does this do to the indexation and ranking of it's subpages (the actual match pages)

Option B - Using 301-redirects

Using 301-redirects essentially the user and the Search Engine are treated the same. When the Season page or competition page are requested both are redirected to game week page.

The same applies here as applies for the canonical URL: every week there are changes in the redirects.

So in game week 8:

• the page on 'website.com/$competition/' would have a 301-redirect that points to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-8'
• the page on  'website.com/$competition/$season' would have a 301-redirect that points to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-8'

A week goes by, so then you have:

• the page on 'website.com/$competition/' would have a 301-redirect that points to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-9'
• the page on  'website.com/$competition/$season' would have a 301-redirect that points to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-9'

Advantages

• There is no loss of link authority.

Disadvantages

• Before a playweek starts the playweek in question can be indexed. However, in the current playweek the playweek page 301-redirects to the competition page. After that week the page's 301-redirect is removed again and it's indexable.
• What do all the (changing) 301-redirects do to the overall quality of the website for Search Engines (and users)?

Option C - Using 302-redirects

Most SEO's will refrain from using 302-redirects. However, 302-redirect can be put to good use: for serving a temporary redirect.

Within my website there's the content that's most important to the users (and therefor search engines) is constantly moving. In most cases after a week a different piece of the website is most interesting for a user. So let's take our example above. We're in playweek 8.

If you want 'website.com/$competition/' to be redirecting to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-8/' you can use a 302-redirect. Because the redirect is temporary

The next week the 302-redirect on 'website.com/$competition/' will be adjusted. It'll be pointing to 'website.com/$competition/$season/week-9'.

Advantages

• We're putting the 302-redirect to its actual use.
• The pages that 302-redirect (for instance 'website.com/$competition' and 'website.com/$competition/$season') will remain indexed.

Disadvantages

• Not quite sure how Google will handle this, they're not very clear on how they exactly handle a 302-redirect and in which cases a 302-redirect might be useful. In most cases they advise webmasters not to use it.

I'd very much like your opinion on this. Thanks in advance guys and galls!

[StevenvanVessum]

Hi Andy and Peter, thanks for your response.

@Andy: the rel=next and rel=prev markup won't really help in solving the problem we had. We will use it though because it's very helpful.

@Peter: yeah it's been something we've been struggling with for a while but we've finally made a decision on it.

The /current solution wasn't really a good solution because at the start of a season all the gameweeks are planned and created so it would become quite complex. We've done some calculations on how much duplicate content we would have if we would not use any of the redirects of canonical tags and the percentage of DC is very small (below 1%) so we're going to put our faith in Google's hands and let them figure it out. It's a good quality website with loads of links we're talking about so I don't expect to much issues. We'll monitor it closely though and stand by to interfere when needed.

Anyways, thanks for your suggestions. Although it didn't solve my problem 1:1 it did make me think and make a decision.

Bye, Steven

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, time-sensitive information is always tough. I think you're dead on about the disadvantages - the timing of Google's application of these rotating tags would always be off, and you could end up with some really weird search results that are not only bad for SEO but could create bad UX (people landing on old pages thinking they're new).

What about another option - could you take more of a news/blog approach and have a "/current" page that is always the current week? As the current week changes, roll that content into an archive page ("/week8", etc.). That way, the content lives on, but the current URL never changes.

In terms of duplication, is this really full duplication? It sounds like some pages (like the season) just have snippets of the current week. That's not necessarily a problem. If they are very similar, could you "widgetize" it somehow? Could be straight HTML, but use a condensed format for the season page that links to the full version on the current week page. This would be much like a snippet of a blog post - instead of repeating everything on all 3 pages, have one main chunk of content and two summaries.

[AndyMacLean]

Hi,

Does the rel=next, rel=prev markup help you out with this problem? See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Ive used it a couple of times to help stop pages been seen as dupe content where those pages are duplicate (meta, main content, images etc) except for example reviews, or comments e.g. /product_x   /product_x_review_page1   /product_x_review_page2   /product_x_review_page_3

Andy