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I am making some pages on my website very short. Some contain only about 20-30 words in the body. I will have about 50 of these pages. It is not because I want to spam but I think it is more user friendly.

Will this hurt the overall site's SEO?

I dont care that much about SEO for each individual page, but obviously id care a lot if these small content pages hurt my website in general?

Thanks!

Does duplicate content hurt that particular duplicated content, or the entire site? There are some parts of my site that I don’t care about getting high rankings on search engines. For example, I have a forum and there are certain links that only logged in people can see. If you aren’t logged in, they will take you to a page where it tells u to log in. google, obviously not logged in, interprets this as lots and lots of the same duplicated page. Should I just leave it alone cause I dont care if those pages makes it to search engines. Will it not hurt the entire site? For example, can my homepage search rankings decrase?

That leads to my next question. What is the best way to optimize a forum? Whenever someone posts a new post, it seems another url for the same forum thread is created..... which is obviously duplicated….in other words, if like 20 people post on a thread, i believe my site adds 20 urls for that page...anyone know how to fix this?

Hi Owen,

The first thumbs down was not me. I thought maybe that I did it on accident so I pushed it again thinking it would negate it, but it added another thumbs down. So Im pretty sure the first one was not me....unless ur allowed to thumbs down twice....

I will try to find a way to undo the thumbs down i did on accident.

Sorry about that and I definitely do appreciate your willingness to help. I am not sure who gave u the thumbs down

Edit: I replaced the thumbs down with a thumbs up

Thanks Dana! Youve been so helpful!

But one thing I am confused about, when i read articles about how to fix duplicate content, they always talk about the best two options being 301 or rel=canonical. Why is that?

Isnt 404 error simpler?

Hmm, or is 404 just simpler in my case beacuse all my duplicated pages are pages that users will never go to?

Sorry, I think this is my third question today...

But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc.

Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages."

However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?

Thanks for that!

Do you know if SEOmoz crawlers can pick up redirects?

In other words, will errors still come up when the SEOMOZ crawls?

On my site, which I created with Joomla, there seems to be a lot of duplicated pages. I was wondering which would be better, 301 redirect or rel=canonical.

On SeoMoz Pro "help" they suggest only the rel=canonical and dont mention 301 redirect. However, ive read many other say that 301 redirect should be the number one option.

Also, does 301 redirect help solve the crawling errors, in other words, does it get rid of the errors of "duplicate page content?"

Ive read that re-=canonical does not right?

Thanks!

Thanks for the warning!

Which leads me to another question. I have briefly read about people who do that, and I actually have no idea why (From an SEO perspective) they do and how they do it.

I am using Joomla and for some reason, pages have been created that I did not want and that is why I am going to redirect.

Sooo, is it possible to unintentionally manipulate google with this method? I just dont want to get in trouble...

Thanks!

Hi Dana!

Thanks for the fast and great response!

I had one more followup question.

So lets say I have ten duplicated pages of a homepage. They all have same duplicate title and all are missing meta tags. If I redirect all the duplicated pages, can i just

1. leave all the duplicated titles as is. Will Google see the redirect and not bother reading the duplicated title tags?

2. Just fill the meta tag for the main page to which all duplicated pages point to. Is there a point to filling in missing meta tags for duplicated pages?

Thanks!

Hi,

there are many problems with my site. I have a lot of duplicate page titles and a lot of missing meta tags. However, I think most of them are BECAUSE i have a lot of duplicate pages.

So I have read some articles and I will 301 redirect all the duplicated pages. Will this solve the problem with duplicate titles and missing meta tags as well?

For example, my homepage has like 10 duplicated pages. Since they are duplicated, they have the same titles and they are all missing meta tags. I am planning to fill in meta tags JUST for the canonical page and redirect all duplicated pages to that page. Is this a good practice?

Also, just curious, do different title tags and different meta tag description make the pages "not duplicated?" I assume it will still appear as duplicated....

Sorry if this was confusing...

Hi, I was wondering on the best way to do SEO for a site that publishes articles daily. In other words, I add a new url to my site daily.

How should I ensure that the new pages are optimized?

Do I need to submit each new site to search engines?

Any tips?

Is Seomoz crawl diagnostics useful for determining what pages Google has a hard time indexing. One of the problems with my site is that it uses JS and Flash and I know Google isnt too keen on that. Can Crawl Diagnostics accurately tell me if there is too much of something and therefore Google is having a hard time crawling?

I want to be able to know if JS or Flash is hurting any of my pages in any way. I provide good content and I want to make sure Google can pick it up.....Is this too much to ask? Is there anything out there for this?