Categories VS Tag Duplicate Content
-
Hello Moz community,
I have a question about categories and tags . Our customer www.elshow.pe just had a redesign of its website. We use the same categories listed before . The only change was that two sub categories were added ( these sub-categories were popular tags before ) .Then now I have 2 URL's covering the same content:
- The first is the URL of the subcategory : www.elshow.pe/realitys/combate/
- The second is the URL that is generated by the tag "combate" that is www.elshow.pe/noticias/combate/
I have the same with the second sub category: "Esto es guerra"
The problem is when I search the keyword "combate" in my country (Perú), the URL that positions is the tag URL in 1st page. But, when I search for "esto es guerra" the URL that positions is the **sub category **in the second page.
I also check in OSE both links and sub categories goes better than tags. So what do you guys recommend for this? 301 redirect? canonicals? Any coment is welcome. Thanks a lot for your time.
Italo,
@italominano -
The solution completely depends on what your goals are. Are you investing in those tag pages? Is there a reason to keep them around?
If you noindex as the others here suggested, you're not only not going to rank with that page, you probably won't with the other. I'd decide what you want to support (it seems categories) and redirect the tag pages. Second best option is a canonical, but then you still have the support the tag pages, the search engines might not respect it, and you're putting a bandaid on a bigger wound.
Hope this helps you think through it!
-
I would suggest noindexing these tag pages so that they don't appear in Google and therefore pose no duplicate content issues with Google. Bit of pet peeve of mine to have tag pages being indexed... though they're great for on-site navigation!
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
-
Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
Is Noindex Enough To Solve My Duplicate Content Issue?
Hello SEO Gurus! I have a client who runs 7 web properties. 6 of them are satellite websites, and 7th is his company's main website. For a long while, my company has, among other things, blogged on a hosted blog at www.hismainwebsite.com/blog, and when we were optimizing for one of the other satellite websites, we would simply link to it in the article. Now, however, the client has gone ahead and set up separate blogs on every one of the satellite websites as well, and he has a nifty plug-in set up on the main website's blog that pipes in articles that we write to their corresponding satellite blog as well. My concern is duplicate content. In a sense, this is like autoblogging -- the only thing that doesn't make it heinous is that the client is autoblogging himself. He thinks that it will be a great feature for giving users to his satellite websites some great fresh content to read -- which I agree, as I think the combination of publishing and e-commerce is a thing of the future -- but I really want to avoid the duplicate content issue and a possible SEO/SERP hit. I am thinking that a noindexing of each of the satellite websites' blog pages might suffice. But I'd like to hear from all of you if you think that even this may not be a foolproof solution. Thanks in advance! Kind Regards, Mike
Technical SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
URL query considered duplicate content?
I have a Magento site. In order to reduce duplicate content for products of the same style but with different colours I have combined them on to 1 product page. I would like to allow the pictures to be dynamic, i.e. allow a user to search for a colour and all the products that offer that colour appear in the results, but I dont want the default product image shown but the product image for that colour applying to the query. Therefore to do this I have to append a query string to the end of the URL to produce this result: www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red My question is, will the query variations then be picked up as duplicate content: www.website.com/category/product-name.html www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=yellow Google suggest it has contingencies in its algorithm and I will not be penalised: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/google-duplicate-content-caused-by-url.html But other sources suggest this is not accurate. Note the article was written in 2007.
Technical SEO | | BlazeSunglass0 -
Bad Duplicate content issue
Hi, for grappa.com I have about 2700 warnings of duplicate page content. My CMS generates long url like: http://www.grappa.com/deu/news.php/categoria=latest_news/idsottocat=5 and http://www.grappa.com/deu/news.php/categoria%3Dlatest_news/idsottocat%3D5 (this is a duplicated content). What's the best solution to fix this problem? Do I have to set up a 301 redirect for all the duplicated pages or insert the rel=canonical or rel=prev,next ? It's complicated becouse it's a multilingual site, and it's my first time dealing with this stuff. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | nico860 -
Cross-domain duplicate content issue
Hey all, Just double-checking something. Here's the issue, briefly. One of my clients is a large law firm. The firm has a main site, and an additional site for an office in Atlanta. On the main site, there is a list of all attorneys and links to their profiles (that they wrote themselves). The Atlanta site has this as well, but lists only the attorneys located in that office. I would like to have the profiles for the Atlanta lawyers on both sites. Would rel=canonical work to avoid a dupe-content smackdown? The profiles should rank for Atlanta over the main site. This just means that G will drop the main site's profiles (for those attorneys) from their index, correct? No other weird side effects? I hope I worded all that clearly!
Technical SEO | | LCNetwork0 -
Noindex duplicate content penalty?
We know that google now gives a penalty to a whole duplicate if it finds content it doesn't like or is duplicate content, but has anyone experienced a penalty from having duplicate content on their site which they have added noindex to? Would google still apply the penalty to the overall quality of the site even though they have been told to basically ignore the duplicate bit. Reason for asking is that I am looking to add a forum to one of my websites and no one likes a new forum. I have a script which can populate it with thousands of questions and answers pulled direct from Yahoo Answers. Obviously the forum wil be 100% duplicate content but I do not want it to rank for anyway anyway so if I noindex the forum pages hopefully it will not damage the rest of the site. In time, as the forum grows, all the duplicate posts will be deleted but it's hard to get people to use an empty forum so need to 'trick' them into thinking the section is very busy.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hello, We have many pages in our crawler report that are showing duplicate content. However, the content is not duplicateon the pages. It is somewhat close, but different. I am not sure how to fix the problem so it leaves our report. Here is an example. It is showing these as duplicate content to each other. www.soccerstop.com/c-119-womens.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-120-youth.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-124-adult.aspx Any help you could provide would be most appreciated. I am going through our crawler report and resolving issues, and this seems to be big one for us with lots in the report, but not sure what to do about it. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
James0 -
Strange duplicate content issue
Hi there, SEOmoz crawler has identified a set of duplicate content that we are struggling to resolve. For example, the crawler picked up that this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/industry-insight/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career is a duplicate of this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career. The latter page's content is the original and can be found in the CMS admin area whilst the former page is the duplicate and has no entry in the CMS. So we don't know where to begin if the "duplicate" page doesn't exist in the CMS. The crawler states that this page www. creative-choices.co.uk/industry-insight/inside/creative-writing is the referrer page. Looking at it, only the original page's link is showing on the referrer page, so how did the crawler get to the duplicate page?
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0