Is it possible to deindex old URLs that contain duplicate content?
-
Our client is a recruitment agency and their website used to contain a substantial amount of duplicate content as many of the listed job descriptions were repeated and recycled. As a result, their rankings rarely progress beyond page 2 on Google. Although they have started using more unique content for each listing, it appears that old job listings pages are still indexed so our assumption is that Google is holding down the ranking due to the amount of duplicate content present (one software returned a score of 43% duplicate content across the website).
Looking at other recruitment websites, it appears that they block the actual job listings via the robots.txt file.
Would blocking the job listings page from being indexed either by robots.txt or by a noindex tag reduce the negative impact of the duplicate content, but also remove any link juice coming to those pages?
In addition, expired job listing URLs stay live which is likely to be increasing the overall duplicate content. Would it be worth removing these pages and setting up 404s, given that any links to these pages would be lost? If these pages are removed, is it possible to permanently deindex these URLs?
Any help is greatly appreciated!
-
HI Harry, He should be able to set this up dynamically. Otherwise, yes I do feel sorry for him but then he didn't he didn't built it right the first time anyway. Martijn.
-
Hi Martijn,
Thank you for responding. I think canonical tags are the best way forward, I am looking forward to explain to the web developer that we need several hundred tags implementing!
Many thanks
-
I would definitely make sure that the pages that are expired will indeed return a 404.
In addition, what you could do as well for the duplicate content pages is use a canonical tag to point back to the original page. Wouldn't that work for you?
-
Hello,
If you want to speed up the process of deindexing, after setup all noindex tags you could upload a sitemap in GSC with all URLs you want to be crawled again.
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
-
Old url is still indexed
A couple of months ago we requested a change of address in Search console. The new, correct url is already indexed. Yet when we search the old url (with site:www.) we find that the old url is still indexed. in Google Webmaster Tools the amount of indexed pages is reduced to 1. Is there another way to remove old urls?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Tricky Duplicate Content Issue
Hi MOZ community, I'm hoping you guys can help me with this. Recently our site switched our landing pages to include a 180 item and 60 item version of each category page. They are creating duplicate content problems with the two examples below showing up as the two duplicates of the original page. http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=180&p=1 http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=60&p=1 The original page is http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts I was just going to do a rel=canonical for these two 180 item and 60 item pages to the original landing page but then I remembered that some of these landing pages have page 1, page 2, page 3 ect. I told our tech department to use rel=next and rel=prev for those pages. Is there anything else I need to be aware of when I apply the canonical tag for the two duplicate versions if they also have page 2 and page 3 with rel=next and rel=prev? Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Partially duplicated content on separate pages
TL;DR: I am writing copy for some web pages. I am duplicating some bits of copy exactly on separate web pages. And in other cases I am using the same bits of copy with slight alterations. Is this bad for SEO? Details: We sell about 10 different courses. Each has a separate page. I'm currently writing copy for those pages. Some of the details identical for each course. So I can duplicate the content and it will be 100% applicable. For example, when we talk about where we can run courses (we go to a company and run it on their premises) – that's applicable to every course. Other bits are applicable with minor alterations. So where we talk about how we'll tailor the course, I will say for example: "We will the tailor the course to the {technical documents|customer letters|reports} your company writes." Or where we have testimonials, the headline reads "Improving {customer writing|reports|technical documents} in every sector and industry". There is original content on each page. The duplicate stuff may seem spammy, but the alternative is me finding alternative re-wordings for exactly the same information. This is tedious and time-consuming and bizarre given that the user won't notice any difference. Do I need to go ahead and re-write these bits ten slightly different ways anyway?
Technical SEO | | JacobFunnell0 -
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 -
Tags and Duplicate Content
Just wondering - for a lot of our sites we use tags as a way of re-grouping articles / news / blogs so all of the info on say 'government grants' can be found on one page. These /tag pages often come up with duplicate content errors, is it a big issue, how can we minimnise that?
Technical SEO | | salemtas0 -
Duplicate content error - same URL
Hi, One of my sites is reporting a duplicate content and page title error. But it is the same page? And the home page at that. The only difference in the error report is a trailing slash. www.{mysite}.co.uk www.{mysite}.co.uk/ Is this an easy htaccess fix? Many thanks TT
Technical SEO | | TheTub1 -
How can i resolve Duplicate Page Content?
Hello, I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tools for my website AutoDreams.it i have found 159 duplicate page content. My problem is that this web site is about car adsso it is easy to create pages with duplicate content and also Car ads are placed byregistered users. How can i resolve this problem? Regards Francesco
Technical SEO | | francesco870