Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
-
Hello,
We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools.
However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below
Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation?
Thanks,
Stephen.
-
Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time to contribute.
If Google doesn't crawl and index, can you guys explain this?
I have found the solution elsewhere. The canonical tag is auto-generated, so it is creating it's own canonical tag for the pages. So we need to create a rule in the back end that exlcudes parameters after the end of our URL's
-
I completely agree with the above answer, the links with GCLID are generated through Google Adwords and so on they won't be available to Googlebot when crawling the site. Also if it even would happen you could let Google ignore that parameter, but as it's one of Googles own parameters I doubt it would ever get you in trouble.
-
Hi Stephen,
GoogleBot can't crawl links with a gclid, so they won't end up in the index and won't be flagged as duplicate pages.
AdWords does not work this way. The script that produces the ads contains no links--there's nothing for GoogleBot to discover without running the script. which it does not do. I am not certain that Google search produces the ads the same way, but what would be the point of GoogleBot crawling Google SERPs? It doesn't do that.
I do include canonical tag in the header of all our pages, which is one of Google's suggestions for dealing with this. I suppose that could be why I don't have an issue with this.
*If you don't believe this to be true, look through your logs and try to find one record of GoogleBot crawling an AdWords link with a valid gclid.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
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
-
SEM Rush & Duplicate content
Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Does Google see this as duplicate content?
I'm working on a site that has too many pages in Google's index as shown in a simple count via a site search (example): site:http://www.mozquestionexample.com I ended up getting a full list of these pages and it shows pages that have been supposedly excluded from the index via GWT url parameters and/or canonicalization For instance, the list of indexed pages shows: 1. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff 2. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff?page=2 3. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?page=3 4. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?mq_source=q-and-a 5. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?type=productss&sort=1date Example #1 above is the one true page for search and the one that all the canonicals reference. Examples #2 and #3 shouldn't be in the index because the canonical points to url #1. Example #4 shouldn't be in the index, because it's just a source code that, again doesn't change the page and the canonical points to #1. Example #5 shouldn't be in the index because it's excluded in parameters as not affecting page content and the canonical is in place. Should I worry about these multiple urls for the same page and if so, what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Google isn't seeing the content but it is still indexing the webpage
When I fetch my website page using GWT this is what I receive. HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacobfy
X-Pantheon-Styx-Hostname: styx1560bba9.chios.panth.io
server: nginx
content-type: text/html
location: https://www.inscopix.com/
x-pantheon-endpoint: 4ac0249e-9a7a-4fd6-81fc-a7170812c4d6
Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400
Content-Length: 0
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:29:38 GMT
X-Varnish: 2640682369 2640432361
Age: 326
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive What I used to get is this: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:24 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.23 (Amazon)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.18
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:24 +0000
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
ETag: "1365696024"
Content-Language: en
Link: ; rel="canonical",; rel="shortlink"
X-Generator: Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:sioc="http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#"
xmlns:sioct="http://rdfs.org/sioc/types#"
xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"> <title>Inscopix | In vivo rodent brain imaging</title>0 -
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 -
How best to handle (legitimate) duplicate content?
Hi everyone, appreciate any thoughts on this. (bit long, sorry) Am working on 3 sites selling the same thing...main difference between each site is physical location/target market area (think North, South, West as an example) Now, say these 3 sites all sell Blue Widgets, and thus all on-page optimisation has been done for this keyword. These 3 sites are now effectively duplicates of each other - well the Blue Widgets page is at least, and whist there are no 'errors' in Webmaster Tools am pretty sure they ought to be ranking better than they are (good PA, DA, mR etc) Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure 🙂 So - to questions/thoughts. 1 - Is it enough to try and get creative with on-page changes to try and 'de-dupe' them? Kinda tricky with Blue Widgets example - how many ways can you say that? I could focus on geographical element a bit more, but would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally. 2 - I could, i guess, no-index, no-follow, blue widgets page on 2 of the sites, seems a bit drastic though. (or robots.txt them) 3 - I could even link (via internal navigation) sites 2 and 3 to site 1 Blue Widgets page and thus make 2 blue widget pages redundant? 4 - Is there anything HTML coding wise i could do to pull in Site 1 content to sites 2 and 3, without cloaking or anything nasty like that? I think 1- is first thing to do. Anything else? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Capote0 -
Duplicate Content - Panda Question
Question: Will duplicate informational content at the bottom of indexed pages violate the panda update? **Total Page Ratio: ** 1/50 of total pages will have duplicate content at the bottom off the page. For example...on 20 pages in 50 different instances there would be common information on the bottom of a page. (On a total of 1000 pages). Basically I just wanted to add informational data to help clients get a broader perspective on making a decision regarding "specific and unique" information that will be at the top of the page. Content ratio per page? : What percentage of duplicate content is allowed per page before you are dinged or penalized. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content Due To Allocating Two Post Categories
It looks like google has done a pretty deep crawl of my site and is now showing around 40 duplicate content issues for posts that I have tagged in two seperate categories for example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/live-music-boosts-australian-economy http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/live-music-boosts-australian-economy I use the all in one SEO pack and have checked the no index for categories, archive, and tag archive boxes so google shouldn't even crawl this content should it? . I guess the obvious answer is to only put each post in one category but I shouldn't have to should I? Some posts are relevant in more than once category.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
ECommerce syndication & duplicate content
We have an eCommerce website with original software products. We want to syndicate our content to partner and affiliate websites, but are worried about the effect of duplicate content all over the web. Note that this is a relatively high profile project, where thousands of sites will be listing hundreds of our products, with the exact same name, description, tags, etc. We read the wonderful and relevant post by Kate Morris on this topic (here: http://mz.cm/nXho02) and we realize the duplicate content is never the best option. Some concrete questions we're trying to figure out: 1. Are we risking penalties of any sort? 2. We can potentially get tens of thousands of links from this concept, all with duplicate content around them, but from PR3-6 sites, some with lots of authority. What will affect our site more - the quantity of mediocre links (good) or the duplicate content around them (bad)? 3. Should we sacrifice SEO for a good business idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erangalp0