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I think this is one of the most overlooked duplicate content issues.  Not sure why it's not talked about as much as it is.  I quite often have been using upper and lowercase intermittently.  E.g., mysite.com/Las-Vegas/ and mysite.com/las-vegas/, not knowing it made any difference.

I guess a .htaccess rewrite to all lowercase is in order.  Thanks SEOMoz.  You guys rock.

Most of the Plugins for wordpress use canonical urls.

I have city centric website.  For sake of simplicity, say I only have 2 cities -- City A and City B.

Depending on a user's IP address, they will either get City A or City B.  Users can change their location through javascript on pages.  But there is no cross-linking between cities.  By this, I mean that unless you can read or execute javascript, there is no way for you to get from city A to City B.

My concern is this:  googlebot comes to my site, and we serve them up City A.  How does City B get discovered if Googlebot doesn't read javascript?

We have an xml sitemap plus plenty of backlinks to City B.  Is this sufficient?

Should I provide a static link to City B (and vice versa) on the homepage for crawling purposes?

Thanks gentlemen.  I will probably just go with the NOINDEX in the robots meta tag and see how that works.

Interesting side note, SEOmoz will still report this as a duplicate page though ;-(  Hopefully the search engines won't.

Yup, helps!  Thanks.

Excellent.  That's what we'll probably end up doing.  Egol and Alex, thanks for the responses.

Say I have a page:  mydomain.com/page

But I also have different views:

/?sort=alpha

/print-version

/?session_ID=2892

etc.  All same content, more or less.

Should the subsequent pages have ROBOTS meta tag with noindex?  Should I use canonical?  Both?

Thanks!

I'm new to SEOMoz.  Been digesting the crawl data and have a tonne of action items that we'll be executing on fairly soon.  Love it!

One thing I noticed is in some of crawl warnings include pages that expressly have the ROBOTS meta tag with the "noindex" value.  Example:  many of my noindex pages don't include meta descriptions.  Therefore, is it safe to ignore warnings of this nature for these pages?

Hey thanks for the reply.  I should clarify that the listing page is just that -- a listing of upcoming events.  A separate page features information about the business.  The listings are database driven.  Here is an example...

http://www.chatterblock.com/facility/13/juan-de-fuca-recreation-centre-victoria-bc/events/

My site features businesses that offers activities for kids.  Each business has its own page on my site.  Business pages contains a listing of different activities that organization is putting on (such as events, summer camps, drop-in activities).  Some businesses only offer seasonal activities (for example, during Christmas break and summer camps).  The rest of the year, the business has no activities -- the page is empty.

This is creating 2 problems.  It's poor user experience (which I can fix no problem) but it also is thin content and sometimes treated as duplicate content.

What's the best way to deal with pages whose content can be quite extensive at certain points of the year and shallow or empty at other parts?  Should I include a meta ROBOTS tag to not index when there is no content, and change the tag to index when there is content?  Should I just ignore this problem?  Should I remove the page completely and do a redirect?

Would love to know people's thoughts.

You rock!

Thx for the reply.

The events come up as separate instances when people are browsing our site.  E.g., they browse all upcoming events at a certain swimming pool (rec center), and get a listing with a brief overview.  Then they can click on an event details page.  1 event details page per event.

E.g., http://www.chatterblock.com/facility/12/crystal-pool-and-fitness-centre-victoria-bc/events/

From a user experience, this works great.  question was asked because I don't want to be penalized for having duplicate content.

I have a website that lists various events.  There is one particular event at a local swimming pool that occurs every few months -- for example, once in December 2011 and again in March 2012.  It will probably happen again sometime in the future too.  Each event has its own 'event' page, which includes a description of the event and other details.

In the example above the only thing that changes is the date of the event, which is in an H2 tag.  I'm getting this as an error in SEO Moz Pro as duplicate content.

I could combine these pages, since the vast majority of the content is duplicate, but this will be a lot of work.  Any suggestions on a strategy for handling this problem?

Exactly what I was looking for.  The Pro User Guide was going to be my next question but you've beaten me to the punch.  Thanks!

I'm in the 30 day trial period of SEOMoz Pro.  Ran my first campaign and there are many improvements to be had across the board.  Looking for some sort of guidance as to what I should focus on first.