Duplicate Content for Event Pages

[PurpleGriffon]

Hi Folks,

I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner

I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them?

Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue?

I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Kind Regards

Gareth Daine

[PurpleGriffon]

Yes, good point. Thanks for the advice.

[Hutch42]

You could, but I would not.  Using the canonical tag is telling the search engine that the pages are the same, such as using it on landing pages that may have additional dynamically generated additions to the URL to make sure that Google knows which is the original page.  For your site, each of your events is a separate thing, and how would you choose which event you made the main?  From an UX standpoint you could be driving people who searched for one event on a specific date to either the wrong date or wrong event all together, this would lead to unhappy visitors and a lower ranking of the page or your site as people pogo-ing from your site increased.

[PurpleGriffon]

Thanks for the response. What about using canonicalisation as I suggested above. Would this help too?

[Hutch42]

Google does not penalize for duplicate content. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

That being said, these page's won't really be accessible from a search engine because Google will see them all as the same.  For map event pages I personally would have them not indexed and create a series of landing pages with links off to the different event times so that you can get organic traffic looking for those events in general and then funnel them to the signup pages.