How can I make it so that the various iterations (pages) do not come up as duplicate content ?
-
Hello,
I wondered if somebody could give me some advice.
The problem of various iterations of the clanedar page coming up as duplicate content.
There is a large calendar on my site for events and each time the page is viewed it is seen as duplicate content . How can I make it so that the various iterations (pages) do not come up as duplicate content ? Regards
-
Anthony
There's a few ways to do this, and it does depend a little on the specifics of how the site is set up but the best (and easiest) may be to use the URL parameter settings in Webmaster Tools.
You're going to log into webmaster tools, go to configuration->URL Parameters - set it to NOT index things beyond the ? (this may be numbers 2 and beyond or it may be everything)
How is this set up though? Does the calendar "start" and "end" somewhere or is it going off infinitely in either direction?
The robots.txt file won't keep the page out of the index.
If you can let us know some more specifics that would be great!
-Dan
-
No, no, no. You don't add these to calendar pages. You need to place a file called robots.txt in your root folder.
Read more here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt
-
Gamer07
Thanks for this , it is very helpful. I'll try it out.
Just to clarify I need to add this to every calendar page which comes up as being duplicate? If so is there a quick way of doing it as there are (I kid you not) over 5,000 calendar pages which are coming up as duplicate. Obviously I'd prefer not to go through all of those manually.
Going forwards I take it that I add this to every calendar page. Is there there a proactive way of stopping it in the first place or is it just a case of remedying it (with this code) once it occurs . As obviously ideally I'd like to stop it occuring again in the future as opposed to keep remedying it again and again.
Many thanks
-
Hi,
When you change the page, check the URL, you will see parameters. Such as calendar?week=18
Open your robots.txt file and add this line
Disallow: /calendar?
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
-
Content on product category pages - does Google care?
Hi All, I've always been unsure about the importance of content on product category pages. Nobody reads it. If you search for "living room chairs", you're just going to want to see a big list of living room chairs - not read content about living room chairs, how to choose one, etc. On virtually any ecommerce site, category pages have a paragraph or two of total bla-bla. Does this have any impact on search rankings? More specifically, will Googlebot see content on how to choose a living room chair and say "Yes! This is really helpful content"? Or, will it realize that the searcher intent on this keyword is really just to see a list of chairs, and ignore this content - or at least downplay its importance? WDTY?
On-Page Optimization | | BarryBuckman0 -
Duplicate page content
Hi Crawl errors is showing 2 pages of duplicate content for my clients WordPress site: /news/ & /category/featured/ Yoast is installed so how best to resolve this ? i see that both pages are canonicalised to themselves so presume just need to change the canonical tag on /category/featured/ to reference /news/ ?(since news is the page with higher authority and the main page for showing this info) or is there other way in Yoast or WP to deal with this & prevent from happening again ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate content, which seems not to be duplicate :S
After crawling I am used to getting a lot of duplicate content messages in Moz, which are High Priority. I do not know what to do with them, since I believe we tackled all the issues. Main point being the advise to put in a link rel=canonical. An example of a page that accordeing to the report has a duplicate. I do not see how. Can you help with that? http://www.beat-it.nl/4y6hctr24x7wdmr-ml350-p-ic-procaresvc.html duplicate sample http://www.beat-it.nl/modu-hp-a5800-acm-for-64-256-aps.html
On-Page Optimization | | Raymo0 -
Add content as blog post or to product pages?
Hi, We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product. The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless. Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
On-Page Optimization | | azu25
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product. I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages). From what I can see, here are the pros and cons: Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership.. Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords.. I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks! [EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...0 -
Should I have content on my home page or links to my articles
Hi, i have asked this question a couple of times without any luck so i am hoping third time lucky. My site www.in2town.co.uk has dropped in the rankings for two of my important keywords, lifestyle magazine and lifestyle news, so i am just wondering if i have to much content on the page for google to understand what the page is about. i am thinking to just have the links on my page instead of the intro to the articles, for example another online magazine does this, http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/ Can anyone please let me know if i should keep the intro to the articles or if i should go with the links idea like femalefirst does to help google understand that we are a lifestyle magazine any advice would be great
On-Page Optimization | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Localised content/pages for identical products
I've got a question about localising the website of a nationwide company. We're a small dance school with nationwide (40 cities) coverage for around 40 products. Currently, we have one page for each product (style of dance), and one page for each city; the product pages cover keywords like 'cheerleading dance class' while the city pages target the 'london dance classes'-type keywords. To make 'localised product pages', I feel like we should make a page for every city/product combo 'London cheerleading classes' - but that seems like a nightmare for both writing sexy & original content, and link building/social stats. The other thing I can think of (which I refuse to do because it would look stupid & flag the page as keyword stuffed) is filling the page with the keyword phrases which are appropriate for every city. Is there another way to let google know 'this page is appropriate for these cities...'? We do currently list the cities a product is available in, but it doesn't seem to help local rankings very much. Would this just be a link building job, using hyper-targeted anchor texts (inc. city names) for each product? How do the pro's tackle this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | AlecPR0 -
Duplicate page content,
Hi, in my campaign crawls diagnostic, I have a lot of Duplicate page content, but we use canonicalization and I used webmastertool to make sure the campaign parameters are not consider by the Google bot. Can you see what could be my problem, or do you have a tip for me or things to look at ? Thank You VB
On-Page Optimization | | Vale70