Duplicate Pages #!
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Hi guys,
Currently have duplicate pages accross a website e.g.
The only difference is the URL 1 has a hashtag and exclamation tag. Everything else is the same.
We were thinking of adding rel canonical tags on the #! versions of the page to the correct URLs. But Google doens't seem to be indexing the #! versions anyway.
Does anyone know why this is the case? If Google is not indexing them, is there any point adding rel canonical tags?
Cheers,
Chris
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Hi,
In most cases having duplicate content is not going to punish/hurt you in terms of SEO (unless it's deceptive content) - see https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en
It remains however best practice to make sure that content on only one unique url - the example you give seems to be a text book example of 'when to use canonicals' - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
The fact that Google doesn't seem to index the #! pages is probably related to the fact that these pages have few incoming links and that it's making the correct guess that these duplicate pages are not really important. You should also take into account that the site: command is not necessarily giving you all the pages that are indexed.
Long answer to confirm that you better add the canonical.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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