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Does schema.org assist with duplicate content concerns
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The issue of duplicate content has been well documented and there are lots of articles suggesting to noindex archive pages in WordPress powered sites.
Schema.org allows us to mark-up our content, including marking a components URL. So my question simply, is no-indexing archive (category/tag) pages still relevant when considering duplicate content?
These pages are in essence a list of articles, which can be marked as an article or blog posting, with the url of the main article and all the other cool stuff the scheme gives us.
Surely Google et al are smart enough to recognise these article listings as gateways to the main content, therefore removing duplicate content concerns.
Of course, whether or not doing this is a good idea will be subjective and based on individual circumstances - I'm just interested in whether or not the search engines can handle this appropriately.
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Thanks Takeshi - useful comments.
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That's an interesting question. Semantic markup can be used to help Google understand what different pages are (i.e. tag pages), but it doesn't really solve the problems caused by duplicate content, namely:
- Thin Content - Tag pages and other similar pages are thin content, with not much utility for the user, and are probably not going to rank well in Google anyway. Even if they do rank, they won't convert as well as your main pages.
- Keyword Cannibalization - Even if your tag pages & duplicate content rank, they could potentially outrank your main content, leading to lower conversions.
- Panda - Too many thin content pages can lower Google's opinion of your site as a whole, leading to a Panda penalty.
Given the problems above, semantic markup doesn't really help with any of them. Semantic markup can help Google understand what a tag page is, but that doesn't mean you want to have that page indexed.
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