Duplicate Content with URL Parameters
-
Moz is picking up a large quantity of duplicate content, consists mainly of URL parameters like ,pricehigh & ,pricelow etc (for page sorting).
Google has indexed a large number of the pages (not sure how many), not sure how many of them are ranking for search terms we need.
I have added the parameters into Google Webmaster tools And set to 'let google decide', However Google still sees it as duplicate content.
Is it a problem that we need to address? Or could it do more harm than good in trying to fix it?
Has anyone had any experience?
Thanks
-
Think I've sussed it.
There is only about three or four main parameters so went to GA, Behaviour more > site content > all pages
Then did a search for part of the parameter name, sure enough you are right only a handful of visits.
Many Thanks
Is duplicate content of this sort actually a major issue? Especially considering Google should already know from Webmaster tools that these are parameter pages.
-
If you know what URLs there are they probably have a common URL parameter that you could check for in your reports on landing pages. That would make it very easy to check the result for this with a couple clicks. If you want to go advanced than identify the URLs that have issues and run them through the Google Analytics Reporting API
-
Err-umm, next question then how do I check 3700 pages+ that have this problem for traffic?
(Other than turning into a night owl and having to purchase a new mouse :-))
-
'Easy', just check if these kind of pages are getting a lot of search traffic. Usually that isn't the case with filter/order pages, so if they drop in rankings it won't cost you search traffic.
-
Canonical URL is a good point, what about pages that have already being indexed possibly for a search term?
Are these going to drop off the rankings?
-
Have you considered using either a canonical URL or using robots.txt to prevent Googlebot from seeing these URLs in the first place?
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
-
Backup Server causing duplicate content flag?
Hi, Google is indexing pages from our backup server. Is this a duplicate content issue? There are essentially two versions of our entire domain indexed by Google. How do people typically handle this? Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Duplicate content issue with pages that have navigation
We have a large consumer website with several sections that have navigation of several pages. How would I prevent the pages from getting duplicate content errors and how best would I handle SEO for these? For example we have about 500 events with 20 events showing on each page. What is the best way to prevent all the subsequent navigation pages from getting a duplicate content and duplicate title error?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundbrix0 -
E-commerce duplicate URLS
Hi I just realized that my e-commerce products do not have any difference except the SKUS, PRICE and THE PRODUCT name. Apart from each page has the same sidebar and a piece of content ( same ) under each product pages. And this is the reason why i am getting too many duplicate urls warning through Moz analytics. I do not have any other contents to add for each product because of the nature of the product. Only the price, product name and the SKUs will be different and rest will all be same for each products. How can i fix this ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MindlessWizard0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Careerbags
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=baggallini All 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?0 -
Duplicate page content errors stemming from CMS
Hello! We've recently relaunched (and completely restructured) our website. All looks well except for some duplicate content issues. Our internal CMS (custom) adds a /content/ to each page. Our development team has also set-up URLs to work without /content/. Is there a way I can tell Google that these are the same pages. I looked into the parameters tool, but that seemed more in-line with ecommerce and the like. Am I missing anything else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
How to Best Establish Ownership when Content is Duplicated?
A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author? Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A. Will that work, or is there a better solution? This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Allie_Williams0 -
Worldwide Stores - Duplicate Content Question
Hello, We recently added new store views for our primary domain for different countries. Our primary url: www.store.com Different Countries URLS: www.store.com/au www.store.com/uk www.store.com/nz www.store.com/es And so forth and so on. This resulted in an almost immediate rankings drop for several keywords which we feel is a result of duplicate content creation. We've thousands of pages on our primary site. We've assigned a "no follow" tags to all store views for now, and trying to roll back the changes we did. However, we've seen some stores launching in different countries with same content, but with a country specific extensions like .co.uk, .co.nz., .com.au. At this point, it appears we have three choices: 1. Remove/Change duplicate content in country specific urls/store views. 2. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au with duplicate content for now. 3. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au etc with fresh content for all stores. Please keep in mind, option 1, and 3 can get very expensive keeping hundreds of products in untested territories. Ideally, we would like test first and then scale. However, we'd like to avoid any duplicate penalties on our main domain. Thanks for your help and answers on the same.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globaleyeglasses0 -
Duplicate Content Through Sorting
I have a website that sells images. When you search you're given a page like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/ I also give users the option to resort results by date, views and rating like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/byrating/ I've seen in SEOmoz that Google might see these as duplicate content, but it's a feature I think is useful. How should I address this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andertoons0