Duplicate Content

[David_Moceri]

I'm currently working on a site that sells appliances. Currently, there are thousands of "issues" with this site, many of them dealing with duplicate content. Now, the product pages can be viewed in "List" or "Grid" format. As Lists, they have very little in the way of content.

My understanding is that the duplicate content arises from different URLs going to the same site. For instance, the site might have a different URL when told to display 9 items than when told to display 15. This could then be solved by inserting rel = canonical.

Is there a way to take a site and get a list of all possible duplicates? This would be much easier than slogging through every iteration of the options and copying down the URLs. Also, is there anything I might be missing in terms of why there is duplicate content? Thank you.

[David_Moceri]

Thank you.

[anthonydnelson]

Essentially, you need to figure out the primary causes of duplicate content and then pick a way to handle it. A great spot to find your duplicate content is in Google Webmaster Tools under the HTML Improvements section. Look at the section titled "Duplicate Title Tags" and this will show you a spot where you very well may have duplicate content.

The primary ways to take care of it will be:

• NoIndexing
• Canonicalizing
• Parameter Handling in Google Webmaster Tools

Choosing which technique you use will likely be a result of what you are technically able to implement, based on each unique challenge from the different causes of duplicate content. You likely won't be able to kill all of the duplicate content at once. I suggest handling it in chunks. For example, first tackle the Items Shown problem you reference in your question. As you mentioned, you could canonicalize it. Basically, whenever the URL reflects your Item Parameter, you could canonicalize it back to the representative URL.

ie: yoursite.com/category-results&items=15   --> would canonicalize to yoursite.com/category-results

Once you have the Number of Item pages out of the index, focus on the next biggest cause of duplicate content.

[FedeEinhorn]

Have you created a Moz campaign for the site? As Mozbot crawls your site and tells you about all the duplicate content issues that you may have.

To solve that, instead of checking of changing code all over the place, make the changes on those pages that you already know have duplicate content issues (like in the example you gave) and then let Mozbot re-crawl the site so you can see which pages still have issues to solve them.

The rel canonical should point to the one page that has the most info (as you said list has less, grid will be better for the canonical).

If your site uses several categories and subcategories, you should also have a look at the noindex tag, as sometimes that creates duplicate content issues too (subcategory products listed in the root category). The same applies to any kind of listings, such as search results (which should be noindexed).

Hope this helps!