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
-
URL Parameters
Hi Moz Community, I'm working on a website that has URL parameters. After crawling the site, I've implemented canonical tags to all these URLs to prevent them from getting indexed by Google. However, today I've found out that Google has indexed plenty of URL parameters.. 1-Some of these URLs has canonical tags yet they are still indexed and live. 2- Some can't be discovered through site crawling and they are result in 5xx server error. Is there anything else that I can do (other than adding canonical tags) + how can I discover URL parameters indexed but not visible through site crawling? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bbop330 -
Duplicating content from manufacturer for client site and using canonical reference.
We manage content for many clients in the same industry, and many of them wish to keep their customers on their individualized websites (understandably). In order to do this, we have duplicated content in part from the manufacturers' pages for several "models" on the client's sites. We have put in a Canonical reference at the start of the content directing back to the manufacturer's page where we duplicated some of the content. We have only done a handful of pages while we figure out the canonical reference potential issue. So, my questions are: Is this necessary? Does this hurt, help or not do anything SEO-wise for our ranking of the site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moz1admin1 -
Galleries and duplicate content
Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!0 -
Reinforcing Rel Canonical? (Fixing Duplicate Content)
Hi Mozzers, We're having trouble with duplicate content between two sites, so we're looking to add some oomph to the rel canonical link elements we put on one of our sites pointing towards the other to help speed up the process and give Google a bigger hint. Would adding a hyperlink on the "copying" website pointing towards the "original" website speed this process up? Would we get in trouble if added about 80,000 links (1 on each product page) with a link to the matching product on the other site? For example, we could use text like "Buy XY product on Other Brand Name and receive 10% off!"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Can videos be considered duplicate content?
I have a page that ranks 5 and to get a rich snippet I'm thinking of adding a relevant video to the page. Thing is, the video is already on another page which ranks for this keyword... but only at position 20. As it happens the page the video is on is the more important page for other keywords, so I won't remove it. Will having the same video on two pages be considered a duplicate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Should I redirect all my subdomains to a single unique subdomain to eliminate duplicate content?
Hi there! I've been working on http://duproprio.com for a couple of years now. In the early stages of the website, we've put into place a subdomain wildcard, that allowed us to create urls like this on the fly : http://{some-city}.duproprio.com This brought us instantly a lot of success in terms of traffic due to the cities being great search keywords. But now, business has grown, and as we all know, duplicate content is the devil so I've been playing with the idea of killing (redirecting) all those urls to their equivalent on the root domain. http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 would redirect to equivalent page at : http://duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 Even if my redirections are 301 permanent, there will be some juice lost for each link redirected that are actually pointing to my old subdomains This would also imply to redirect http://www.duproprio.com to http://duproprio.com. Which is probably the part I'm most anxious about since the incoming links are almost 50/50 between those 2 subdomains... Bringing everything back into a single subdomain is the thing to do in order to get all my seo juice together, this part is obvious... But what can I do to make sure that I don't end up actually losing traffic instead of gaining authority? Can you help me get the confidence I need to make this "move" without risking to lose tons of traffic? Thanks a big lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DuProprio.com0 -
Should I robots block site directories with primarily duplicate content?
Our site, CareerBliss.com, primarily offers unique content in the form of company reviews and exclusive salary information. As a means of driving revenue, we also have a lot of job listings in ouir /jobs/ directory, as well as educational resources (/career-tools/education/) in our. The bulk of this information are feeds, which exist on other websites (duplicate). Does it make sense to go ahead and robots block these portions of our site? My thinking is in doing so, it will help reallocate our site authority helping the /salary/ and /company-reviews/ pages rank higher, and this is where most of the people are finding our site via search anyways. ie. http://www.careerbliss.com/jobs/cisco-systems-jobs-812156/ http://www.careerbliss.com/jobs/jobs-near-you/?l=irvine%2c+ca&landing=true http://www.careerbliss.com/career-tools/education/education-teaching-category-5/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0 -
Duplicate page Content
There has been over 300 pages on our clients site with duplicate page content. Before we embark on a programming solution to this with canonical tags, our developers are requesting the list of originating sites/links/sources for these odd URLs. How can we find a list of the originating URLs? If you we can provide a list of originating sources, that would be helpful. For example, our the following pages are showing (as a sample) as duplicate content: www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=11 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=12 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=15 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=2 "How did you get all those duplicate urls? I have tried to google the "contact us", "news", "video" pages. I didn't get all those duplicate pages. The page id=87 on the most of the duplicate pages are not supposed to be there. I was wondering how the visitors got to all those duplicate pages. Please advise." Note, the CMS does not create this type of hybrid URLs. We are as curious as you as to where/why/how these are being created. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlemieux0