Sub-category considered duplicate content?

[hirono]

Hello,

My craw diagnostics from the PRO account is telling me that the following two links have duplicate content and duplicate title tag:

1. http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases (New Blu-ray Releases)

2. http://www.newandupcoming.com/new-blu-ray-releases/action-adventure (New Action & Adventure Releases | Blu-ray)

I am really new to the SEO world so I am stuck trying to figure out the best solution for this issue. My question is how should I fix this issue.

I guess I can put canonical tag on all sub-categories but I was worried that search engines would not craw the sub-categories and index potentially valuable pages.

Thanks for all the help.

[hirono]

Thank you very much for your thorough thoughts, explanation, and your answer to my problem.

Just want to put my thoughts into words here so maybe this conversation can help others that are in the same shoes. The answer to the one question that you've raised, “do users benefit from your site?”, is an idea that I'm trying to prove. You are correct, the site does not provide real unique content except trying to improve user experience to help explore recent product releases on Amazon.com.

This is a niche product because most people are interested in the popular releases and not interested in browsing hundreds of releases (popular or not) by their release date but I believe there are enthusiasts that may benefit from this site. I want to benefit the people that are not just looking for the popular releases. But again, this is yet to be proven.

Thanks for sharing some great ideas to help improve my site. I will keep the review and user generated content concept in mind.

[RyanKent]

The challenge you face is your site does not provide any content. It seems you are an affiliate site for Amazon.com.

The question is, do users benefit from your site? When a user enters a search term in Google, are they ever better off for having found your site? Or would users be better off going directly to amazon?

I am not criticizing your site personally, but sharing google's view. If you offered a good, independent review of each movie, that is great. If you encourage users to generate content by asking their opinions, that is another positive way to go. But to simply link to thousands of movies on another site is not offering value to users or the internet.

The first step is answering the question...what does my site offer users? Why would users feel fortunate to have found my site? Once you have that answer, build upon it.

For your category page problem, you have two options. You can add the "noindex, follow" meta tag to the page. This tag tells search engines that you are not providing unique content and the pages should not be indexed.

Another option is to add unique content to the category pages. For your Action and Adventure page you can describe what movies are part of that genre. "Action and Adventure category includes movies ranging from Die Hard to Indiana Jones. Any fast-paced, heart pumping action movie fits well into this category....." Your content should be at least a few hundred words, something you wrote yourself, and something users might find helpful.