Duplicate Titles for Large Lists
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Our blog (www.cowleyweb.com/blog) has recently been given topic categories so we can utilize our old blogs. Otherwise, users would only see what's new and never look back (our blogs are organized by the month they were published) and all that hard work would kind of be a waste after a while.
So we came up with a few topics (i.e. social media, internet marketing, etc.) and adding those as tags to blogs. Now, users can click the topics and get a results page on our blog of all the previously published blogs related to that topic. Sounds great.
BUT, it's hurting our SEO crawl report. If the list goes beyond one page of search results, the 2nd and subsequent pages get dinged as "duplicate title" b/c they share the same title (i.e. "Social Media"). How can I fix this?
I'm not the web designer but something tells me maybe some sort of tag that says "Page 2" or something would do the trick. We use Drupal which is good for customization.
I assume tons of bloggers and websites have dealt with this problem.
Please help. Want to give the web guy some solutions.
Thank you.
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I have never used it but try implementing the Smart Paging module + Tokens - http://drupal.org/project/smart_paging
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I would suggest going to Analytics, segmenting by organic search traffic, and seeing if anyone has landed on those pages from search results in the last 2-3 months. If Google is not returning them in search results, and they are not bringing traffic, Google usually favors cleaning pages out of the index that don't need to be there.
If you don't want to noindex them, you can add "Page 2" etc to the title tags to eliminate the duplicate title errors in the crawl report.
-Dan
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Talked to our web designer. He said he's nervous about no-indexing as if Google will get suspicious and it will hurt more than be a solution. Don't know what to say.
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Hey There
Sounds like you are all set - just want to add that the type of page you're referring to: page/2 etc is "subpages" and you'll also want to look into noindexing those as well, in addition to "tags" and "categories". That should also fix the errors you're seeing in the Moz report.
-Dan
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Thanks guys! That's awesome. Forwarding to our developer.
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It's usually suggested that Tag archives and Category archives be set to NoIndex which will help in alleviating this issue.
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This sounds like a Drupal/CMS issue. if Drupal doesn't have a fix natively, i'm sure a 3rd developer may have a solution:
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