Does duplicate content not concern Rand?

[sbridle]

Hello all,

I'm a new SEOer and I'm currently trying to navigate the layman's minefield that is trying to understand duplicate content issues in as best I can.

I'm working on a website at the moment where there's a duplicate content issue with blog archives/categories/tags etc.

I was planning to beat this by implementing a noindex meta tag on those pages where there are duplicate content issues.

Before I go ahead with this I thought: "Hey, these Moz guys seem to know what they're doing! What would Rand do?"

Blogs on the website in question appear in full and in date order relating to the tag/category/what-have-you creating the duplicate content problem.

Much like Rand's blog here at Moz - I thought I'd have a look at the source code to see how it was dealt with.

My amateur eyes could find nothing to help answer this question:

E.g.

Both the following URLs appear in SERPs (using site:moz,com and very targeted keywords, but they're there):

https://moz.com/rand/does-making-a-website-mobile-friendly-have-a-universally-positive-impact-on-mobile-traffic/

https://moz.com/rand/category/moz/

Both pages have a rel="canonical" pointing to themselves.

I can understand why he wouldn't be fussed about the category not ranking, but the blog? Is this not having a negative effect?

I'm just a little confused as there are so many conflicting "best practice" tips out there - and now after digging around in the source code on Rand's blog I'm more confused than ever!

Any help much appreciated,

Thanks

[sbridle]

Hi Rand,

Thanks for taking the time to answer my post. It was actually my Moz analytics campaign which flagged up the issue - I so understand they're guidelines, rather than definitive answers.

I think you've cracked it for me though! A true gent - your moustache would be proud.

Where my site differs is in it does not link to the individual posts and shows all content from those blog posts in full on the category page. I'm now going to go away and (get someone much cleverer than me to) implement changes in the way of snippets of blogs linking through to the full blog articles.

Thanks again for the help.

[randfish]

Hi Stephen - when it comes to blogs, especially Wordpress blogs with paginated categories, Google's gotten plenty good over the years at knowing that the full post is the correct version. The category pages on moz.com/rand don't show the full content of the post, don't earn the same links, and do link to the individual posts, so it's really not a concern to noindex them (and, in fact, it might prevent crawling/indexation that I want Google to be able to do).

e.g. I want Google to be able to index https://moz.com/rand/category/archives/startups/ and https://moz.com/rand/mixergy-interview-startup-marketing-reaching-early-adopters-burnout-more/ even though the category page has a small snippet from the Mixergy post.

In these cases of cases, the right pages are ranking for the right queries, and Google's doing a good job of recognizing and differentiating categories vs. posts.

Hope that helps!