Using Rel Nofollow on Duplicate Pages
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Hi there,
I have a rather large site that has duplicate content on many pages due to how it's being spidered by google. I was hoping I could set the internal link to this page as "nofollow."
My question is that I have hundreds of other sites with backlinks to these duplicate content pages.. will this affect me negatively if I tell google not to index the duplicated pages?
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Nofollow is no longer a way to block indexing of internal links. External yes, internal no.
Chad's answer about canonicals is a good one. Depending on how/why the duplicate pages are created/required example, sort orders or page 2, page 3, page 4 of the same page, you also have a couple of other options:
- Managing url paramaters in Google Webmaster Tools http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
- Googles rel next and rel prev tags http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
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Cheers - great answer thanks!
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I found this page within SEO MOZ that answers the link juice question:
"Will this pass 100% of the link juice from a given page to another? More or less than a 301 redirect does now? Note that Google's official representative from the web spam team, Matt Cutts, said today that it passes link juice akin to a 301 redirect but also noted (when SEOmoz's ownGillian Muessig asked specifically) that "it loses no more juice than a 301," which suggests that there is some fractional loss when either of these are applied."
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Add this to the top of your pages that you feel have the same content somewhere else on the website.
As far as the backlinks, I am not sure how that will pan-out. In theory they should still flow. I'll have to double check and make sure. However, duplicate content is a big issue. I deal with it on a national level and it is a total nightmare, especially when the site is very large-dynamically produce by a cms that is not seo friendly.
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