Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"

[Kingalan1]

Greetings Moz Community:

I purchased a  SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit.

The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly.

My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors.

So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the  SEMrush audit.

Thanks, Alan

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[reserve123]

Thanks for cleaning that up, Dennis.  That is great advice.

[DennisSeymour]

I encounter sometimes that with my clients. The basic thing to do is just to add a canonical since they are already noindexed especially for themes that utilize certain pages within a page. Crazy sounding but some themes actually does this so you can't remove the duplicate page, so noindexing it then adding a canonical is already good enough.

But since you mentioned these are just tags, then simply noindexing them is fine. (I'm assuming these are just basic wordpress tags)

As for your pagination question, use a canonical to link to a URL where all the posts are shown. That's the basic rule for that situation and it's somewhere in Google guidelines about pagination

[Kingalan1]

Hi Reserve:

Thanks for your response.

Google is able to view this content because of links that go to and from it? So I am not protected by the no-index tag?

I am very unfamiliar with the strange tags generated by Wordpress. Do you think that such tags as the following can be removed without any detrimental effect? If the URLS for these tags are removed should there be redirects added? http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/boutique-space, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/meatpacking-district, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/restaurant-space, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/retail-space, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/store-space, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/the-plaza-district, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/times-square, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/chelsea, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/upper-east-side, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/upper-west-side

Also, should canonical tags be added to blog URLs even if they are set to no-index? For example:

http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/page/2

http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/page/3

http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/page/4

Thanks, Alan

[reserve123]

I would remove them, to be safe.  Google sees them regardless of the "no-index", and I think that the cleaner you can get your data, the better off you will be in the long run.  While there may be no harm at this time, things always change.  I know one thing for sure, and that is that you don't want a duplicate content issue.