Robots.txt & Duplicate Content
-
In reviewing my crawl results I have 5666 pages of duplicate content. I believe this is because many of the indexed pages are just different ways to get to the same content. There is one primary culprit. It's a series of URL's related to CatalogSearch - for example; http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=Mobile
I have 10074 of those links indexed according to my MOZ crawl. Of those 5349 are tagged as duplicate content. Another 4725 are not.
Here are some additional sample links:
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?dir=desc&order=relevance&p=2&q=Amy
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?color=28&q=bellemonde
http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?cat=9&color=241&dir=asc&order=relevance&q=baggalliniAll of these links are just different ways of searching through our product catalog. My question is should we disallow - catalogsearch via the robots file? Are these links doing more harm than good?
-
For product pages, I would canonical the page with the most descriptive URL.
For category pages, I agree with you, I would noindex them.
I think I just answered my own question!!
-
Oke, the question concerning rel="canonical" is which URL becomes the canonical version? Since there is no page on the website which would be appropiate (as far as i've seen) i recommended the meta robots tag.
I do agree that rel="canonical" is the preferred option, but in this situation i can't see a way to implement it properly. Which page would you highlight as the canonical?
-
I agree entirely that "Search result pages are too varied to be included in the index".
That said, my understanding is that if you canonical a page, it doesn't get indexed. So we wouldn't have to worry about the appearance / user-friendliness of the URL. But (again, in my opinion) we should still worry about link equity being passed, and that won't happen if you noindex.
This gets complicated fast. I like your solution b/c it's a lot cleaner and easier to implement. Still not convinced it's the "best" way to go though.
-
Where is the evidence that these work? I have never seen them work. Google totally ignores the URL parameters tools in GWTs.
-
I do agree that a rel="canonical" is good option for the problem that's at hand.
As jeremy has stated however the link we are referring to in the href section redirects to the home page. http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/index/In my original answer i did not test this. I assumed there would be a list of all products here not filtered by search results. Since this is not the case and this page in fact does not exist it's hard to point at a url to be canonical.
Therefor i changed my answer to include the robots meta tag. This would indeed remove the search pages from the search index. I do think this is a positive thing though.
Look at the following url: http://www.careerbags.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=rolling+laptop+bags
Not really the type of URL i would click on in the search results. The following URL however is something i would want to click on: http://www.careerbags.com/laptop-bags/women-s/rolling-laptop-bags.html
Search result pages are too varied to be included in the index to my opinion.
Hope you agree with this, if not then i would like to hear your thoughts on this.
-
Simon, Wesley, Michael...
These customer facing search result pages are the ones often bookmarked and shared by site visitors. How worried does one need to be about losing link equity? I realize every site is going to be different and social shares don't have link equity - at least for now - but this could add up over time. The rel canonical will enable capture of link equity whereas the robots noindex will not.
Am I over thinking this?
-
In this case you could add the meta robots tag on the search result pages like this:
content="noindex, follow">
Search results can indeed spawn an infinite amount of different URL's. This can be avoided by making sure they are not included in the index but are followed.
-
Webmaster guidelines specifically request that you prevent crawling of search results pages using a robots.txt file. The relevant section reads: "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."
-
There are 2 distinct possible issues here
1. Search results are creating duplicate content
2. Search results are creating lots of thin content
You want to give the user every possibility of finding your products, but you don't want those search results indexed because you should already have your source product page indexed and aiming to rank well. If not see last paragraph.
I slightly misread your post and took the URLs to be purely filtered. You should add disallow /catalogsearch to your robots.txt and if any are indexed you can remove the directory in Webmaster Tools > Google Index > Remove URLs > Reason: Remove Directory. This from Google - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/
If your site has any other parameters not in that directory you can add them in Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters > Let Googlebot Decide. Google will understand they are not the main URLs and treat them accordingly.
As a side issue with your search results it would be a good idea to analyse them in Analytics. You might find you have a trend, maybe something searched for or not the perfect match for the returned result, where you can create new more targeted content.
-
I'm not sure this is the right approach. The catalog search is based on the search box on the website. The query parameter can be anything the customer enters. Are you suggesting that the backend code be modified to always return the in every result?
And why that page because that URL just redirects to the home page because there is no query parameter provided for the search.
In terms o losing link equity, how much equity do they have it they are duplicate content?
-
Hi Jeremy.
Yours is a common problem. The best way to deal with it is, as Wesley mentions, by putting canonical tags on all the duplicate pages - the one you want indexed and to show up in search results AND all the others that you can arrive at via catalog search or any other means of navigation.
Michael's suggestion will prevent the duplicate pages from getting indexed by Google. Unfortunately you lose any link equity going that route, so I'd suggest starting with canonical tags first.
-
To back up the detail Wesley gave you, you can also add URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools
-
You could add a canonical tag to link to the default page. This way Google will know that it should only index that.
The code for this would be:This should be placed in the section of your HTML code.
Some more resources on the subject:
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
-
Website Redesign - Duplicate Content?
I hired a company to redesign our website.there are many pages like the example below that we are downsizing content by 80%.(believe me, not my decision)Current page: https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/New page (on test server):https://servicechampions.mymwpdesign.com/air-conditioning/My question to you is, that 80% of content that i am losing in the redesign, can i republish it as a blog?I know that google has it indexed. The old page has been live for 5 years, but now 80% of it will no longer be live. so can it be a blog and gain new (keep) seo value?What should i do with the 80% of content i am losing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CamiloSC0 -
Duplicate Content Question With New Domain
Hey Everyone, I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content. Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet. The Issue Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc). Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny0 -
Questions about Event Calendar Format and Duplicate Content
Hi there: We maintain a calendar of digital events and conferences on our website here: https://splatworld.tv/events/ . We're trying to add as many events as we can and I'm wondering about the descriptions of each. We're pulling them from the conference websites, mostly, but I'm worried about the scraped content creating duplicate content issues. I've also noticed that most calendars of this type which rank well are not including actual event descriptions, but rather just names, locations and a link out to the conference website. See https://www.semrush.com/blog/the-ultimate-calendar-of-digital-marketing-events-2017/ and http://www.marketingterms.com/conferences/ . Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks, in ..advance..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Mixing up languages on the same page + possible duplicate content
I have a site in English hosted under .com with English info, and then different versions of the site under subdirectories (/de/, /es/, etc.) Due to budget constraints we have only managed to translate the most important info of our product pages for the local domains. We feel however that displaying (on a clearly identified tab) the detailed product info in English may be of use for many users that can actually understand English, and may help us get more conversions to have that info. The problem is that this detailed product info is already used on the equivalent English page as well. This basically means 2 things: We are mixing languages on pages We have around 50% of duplicate content of these pages What do you think that the SEO implications of this are? By the way, proper Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions as well as implementation of href lang tag are in place.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauraseo0 -
Penalties for duplicate content
Hello!We have a website with various city tours and activities listed on a single page (http://vaiduokliai.lt/). The list changes accordingly depending on filtering (birthday in Vilnius, bachelor party in Kaunas, etc.). The URL doesn't change. Content changes dynamically. We need to make URL visible for each category, then optimize it for different keywords (for example city tours in Vilnius for a list of tours and activities in Vilnius with appropriate URL /tours-in-Vilnius).The problem is that activities overlap very often in different categories, so there will be a lot of duplicate content on different pages. In such case, how severe penalty could be for duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpuzakov0 -
Duplicate Content For Product Alternative listing
Hi I have a tricky one here. cloudswave is a directory of products and we are launching new pages called Alternatives to Product X This page displays 10 products that are an alternative to product X (Page A) Lets say now you want to have the alternatives to a similar product within the same industry, product Y (Page B), you will have 10 product alternatives, but this page will be almost identical to Page A as the products are in similar and in the same industry. Maybe one to two products will differ in the 2 listings. Now even SEO tags are different, aren't those two pages considered duplicate content? What are your suggestions to avoid this problem? thank you guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RSedrati0 -
Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
Hi, I look after two websites, one sells commercial mortgages the other sells residential mortgages. We recently redesigned both sites, and one was moved to a new domain name as we rebranded it from being a trading style of the other brand to being a brand in its own right. I have recently discovered that one of my most important pages on the residential mortgages site is not in Google's index. I did a bit of poking around with Copyscape and found another broker has copied our page almost word-for-word. I then used copyscape to find all the other instances of plagiarism on the other broker's site and there are a few! It now looks like they have copied pages from our commercial mortgages site as well. I think the reason our page has been removed from the index is that we relaunced both these sites with new navigation and consequently new urls. Can anyone back me up on this theory? I am 100% sure that our page is the original version because we write everything in-house and I check it with copyscape before it gets published, Also the fact that this other broker has copied from several different sites corroborates this view. Our legal team has written two letters (not sent yet) - one to the broker and the other to the broker's web designer. These letters ask the recipient to remove the copied content within 14 days. If they do remove our content from our site, how do I get Google to reindex our pages, given that Google thinks OUR pages are the copied ones and not the other way around? Does anyone have any experience with this? Or, will it just happen automatically? I have no experience of this scenario! In the past, where I've found duplicate content like this, I've just rewritten the page, and chalked it up to experience but I don't really want to in this case because, frankly, the copy on these pages is really good! And, I don't think it's fair that someone else could potentially be getting customers that were persuaded by OUR copy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?
Is it possible to block an entire subdomain with robots.txt? I write for a blog that has their root domain as well as a subdomain pointing to the exact same IP. Getting rid of the option is not an option so I'd like to explore other options to avoid duplicate content. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss12