"Duplicate" Page Titles and Content
-
Hi All,
This is a rather lengthy one, so please bear with me!
SEOmoz has recently crawled 10,000 webpages from my site, FrenchEntree, and has returned 8,000 errors of duplicate page content. The main reason I have so many is because of the directories I have on site.
The site is broken down into 2 levels of hierachy. "Weblets" and "Articles". A weblet is a landing page, and articles are created within these weblets. Weblets can hold any number of articles - 0 - 1,000,000 (in theory) and an article must be assigned to a weblet in order for it to work. Here's how it roughly looks in URL form - http://www.mysite.com/[weblet]/[articleID]/
Now; our directory results pages are weblets with standard content in the left and right hand columns, but the information in the middle column is pulled in from our directory database following a user query. This happens by adding the query string to the end of the URL. We have 3 main directory databases, but perhaps around 100 weblets promoting various 'canned' queries that users may want to navigate straight into. However, any one of the 100 directory promoting weblets could return any query from the parent directory database with the correct query string. The problem with this method (as pointed out by the 8,000 errors) is that each possible permutation of search is considered to be it's own URL, and therefore, it's own page.
The example I will use is the first alphabetically. "Activity Holidays in France":
http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/ - This link shows you a results weblet without the query at the end, and therefore only displays the left and right hand columns as populated.
http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?CategoryFilter= - This link shows you the same weblet with the an 'open' query on the end. I.e. display all results from this database. Listings are displayed in the middle.
There are around 500 different URL permutations for this weblet alone when you take into account the various categories and cities a user may want to search in.
What I'd like to do is to prevent SEOmoz (and therefore search engines) from counting each individual query permutation as a unique page, without harming the visibility that the directory results received in SERPs. We often appear in the top 5 for quite competitive keywords and we'd like it to stay that way. I also wouldn't want the search engine results to only display (and therefore direct the user through to) an empty weblet by some sort of robot exclusion or canonical classification.
Does anyone have any advice on how best to remove the "duplication" problem, whilst keeping the search visibility? All advice welcome.
Thanks
Matt
-
Thanks for the swift response, Gianluca. I think I understand the problem you have pointed out, but I'm rather surprised that it has been set up in such a way... Or that that would have more of an adverse affect than multiple URLs with the same standard content. I'm willing to change that to see if it fixes the problem though.
Please take all of the time you need... It is a very large site which has been pieced together, bit-by-bit, over many years!
Matt
-
In addition to Gianluca's response there, the pages that you tag with "noindex,follow" (i.e. the duplicates) add a canonical tag pointing at the original page.
-
I think your problem of duplicated content is also due the pagination your categories (or no categories search result) have. Checking the second url you gave http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?order=Sort1&option=&CategoryFilter=&webname=activity-holidays-france&webname=activity-holidays-france&pagenumber=1 and it "second" page http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?order=Sort1&option=&CategoryFilter=&webname=activity-holidays-france&pagenumber=2 I noticed that you have the meta robots in the head... therefore the bots see and index all these paginated content, that is a substantial duplicate of page 1. I suggest you to start adding the noindex,follow meta robots in these pages. About other duplication issues... give me time, as your site is not so easy
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
-
Wondering if creating 256 new pages would cause duplicate content issues
I just completed a long post that reviews 16 landing page tools. I want to add 256 new pages that compare each tool against each other. For example: Leadpages vs. Instapage Leadpages vs. Unbounce Instapage vs. Unbounce, etc Each page will have one product's information on the left and the other on the right. So each page will be a unique combination BUT the same product information will be found on several other pages (its other comparisons vs the other 15 tools). This is because the Leadpages comparison information (a table) will be the same no matter which tool it is being compared against. If my math is correct, this will create 256 new pages - one for each combination of the 16 tools against each other! My site now is new and only has 6 posts/pages if that matters. Want to make sure I don't create a problem early on...Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martechwiz0 -
Redirect old "not found" url (at http) to new corresponding page (now at https)
My least favorite part of SEO 😉 I'm trying to redirect an old url that no longer exists to our new website that is built with https. The old url: http://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens-team/ New url: https://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens/ This isn't working with my standard process of the quick redirection plugin in WP or through htaccess because the old site url is at http and not https. Any help would be much appreciated! How do I accomplish this, where do I do it and what's the code I'd use? Thank you Moz community! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SUCCESSagency0 -
Is all duplication of HTML title content bad?
In light of Hummingbird and that HTML titles are the main selling point in SERPs, is my approach to keyword rich HTML titles bad? Where possible I try to include the top key phrase to descripe a page and then a second top keyphrase describing what the company/ site as a whole is or does. For instance an estate agents site could consist of HTML title such as this Buy Commercial Property in Birmingham| Commercial Estate Agents Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Commercial Estate Agents In order to preserve valuable characters I have also been omitting brand names other than on the home page... is this also poor form?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SoundinTheory0 -
How important is a good "follow" / "no-follow" link ratio for SEO?
Is it very important to make sure most of the links pointing at your site are "follow" links? Is it problematic to post legitimate comments on blogs that include a link back to relevant content or posts on your site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Joomla duplicate content
My website report says http://www.enigmacrea.com/diseno-grafico-portafolio-publicidad and http://www.enigmacrea.com/diseno-grafico-portafolio-publicidad?limitstart=0 Has the same content so I have duplicate pages the only problem is the ?limitstart=0 How can I fix this? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kuavicrea0 -
The same "About" page on multiple WordPress microsites
Hello there, I have over 10 WordPress websites that all have the same "About" page because the same company. I have concerns that this will adversely affect my sites and i'm looking for the best way to deal with this. I was either going to remove the "About" page with Google Webmaster Tools and robots.txt or use the canonical meta tag on that page. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpaMedica0 -
Duplicate content for images
On SEOmoz I am getting duplicate errors for my onsite report. Unfortunately it does not specify what that content is... We are getting these errors for our photo gallery and i am assuming that the reason is some of the photos are listed in multiple categories. Can this be the problem? what else can it be? how can we resolve these issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Schema.org Implementation: "Physician" vs. "Person"
Hey all, I'm looking to implement Schema tagging for a local business and am unsure of whether to use "Physician" or "Person" for a handful of doctors. Though "Physician" seems like it should be the obvious answer, Schema.org states that it should refer to "A doctor's office" instead of a physician. The properties used in "Physician" seem to apply to a physician's practice, and not an actual physician. Properties are sourced from the "Thing", "Place", "Organization", and "LocalBusiness" schemas, so I'm wondering if "Person" might be a more appropriate implementation since it allows for more detail (affiliations, awards, colleagues, jobTitle, memberOf), but I wanna make sure I get this right. Also, I'm wondering if the "Physician" schema allows for properties pulled from the "Person" schema, which I think would solve everything. For reference: http://schema.org/Person http://schema.org/Physician Thanks, everyone! Let me know how off-base my strategy is, and how I might be able to tidy it up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mudbugmedia0