Tags causing Duplicate page content?
-
I was looking through the 'Duplicate Page Content' and Too Many On-Page Link' errors and they all seem to be linked to the 'Tags' on my blog pages. Is this really a problem and if so how should I be using tags properly to get the best SEO rewards?
-
Tags carry no SEO value. All they do is notify your competition the exact keyword phrases that you are targeting. Matt Cutts has suggested many times that categories alone are a best practice.
Have a good one,
Jared
-
Tags and categories can cause duplicate content. If it causes a penalty or not, I don't know.
On smaller sites I've seen the same page listed in the top ten search results for some of my sites. I think this is exactly what Google doesn't want.. I love it but I think Google won't.
I use a plugin on my WP sites called Platinum SEO that allows me to mark tags and categories as noindex, follow. I'm not sure that's the right thing to do but i do it.
I started doing this after noticing i had a lot of duplicate titles "warnings" in Google Webmaster Tools.
Long ago, I read where a Google employee said that if your website has links to the same content Google would not penalize you. That is basically what a tag or category is. Being paranoid though and seeing the duplicate titles in Webmaster Tools, I started dong that just to be safe.
I had a digital camera site take a beating on Google this month. It is slowly coming back up. I had noticed I had more than one result on page one in several cases before I got the smack down. I had failed to setup my categories and tags as no index in the plugin mentioned above. I have no idea if that caused the spanking Google gave me. The articles were 80% original but i had pulled some content from Amazon without re-writing it so that might have caused it.. I really don't know. Its a fairly new site and I've seen that before so it might just be the Google dance. Rankings are now improving I went to number one to number 53. Back at 15 now.
-
I use 2-3 tags. You can get without them at all - this don't prevent me to get high rankings.
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
I have one client with two domains, identical products to appear on both domains. How should I handle this?
Technical SEO | | Hazel_Key0 -
Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!
Using Joomla, every time I create an article a subsequent duplicate page is create, such as: /latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface and /component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface The latter being the duplicate. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the canonical tag on the duplicate is pointing to itself.. creating mayhem in Moz and Webmaster tools. We have hundreds of duplicates across our website and I'm very concerned with the impact this is having on our SEO! I've tried plugins such as sh404SEF and Styleware extensions, however to no avail. Can anyone help or know of any plugins to fix the canonicals?
Technical SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
Duplicate content in product listing
We have "duplicate content" warning in our moz report which mostly revolve around our product listing (eCommerce site) where various filters return 0 results (and hence show the same content on the page). Do you think those need to be addressed, and if so how would you prevent product listing filters that appearing as duplicate content pages? should we use rel=canonical or actually change the content on the page?
Technical SEO | | erangalp0 -
Advice on Duplicate Page Content
We have many pages on our website and they all have the same template (we use a CMS) and at the code level, they are 90% the same. But the page content, title, meta description, and image used are different for all of them. For example - http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs
Technical SEO | | jsmoz
http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rs We have many such pages. Does Google look at them all as duplicate page content? If yes, how do we deal with this?0 -
Testing for duplicate content and title tags
Hi there, I have been getting both Duplicate Page content and Duplicate Title content warnings on my crawl diagnostics report for one of my campaigns. I did my research, and implemented the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools. This did not resolve the crawl diagnostics warnings, and upon further research I discovered the preferred domain would only be noted by Google and not other bots like Roger. My only issue was that when I ran an SEOmoz crawl test on the same domain, I saw none of the duplicate content or title warnings yet they still appear on my crawl diagnostics report. I have now implemented a fix in my .htaccess file to 301 redirect to the www. domain. I want to check if it's worked, but since the crawl test did not show the issue last time I don't think I can rely on that. Can you help please? Thanks, Claire
Technical SEO | | SEOvet0 -
"Standout" tag and "Original content" tags - what's the latest?
In November 2010 Google introduced the "standout tag" http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=191283 I can't find any articles/blog posts/etc in google after that date, but its use was suggested in a google forum today to help with original content issues. Has anyone used them? Does anyone know what's the latest with them? Are they worth trying for SEO? Is there a possible SEO penalty for using them? Thanks, Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
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 -
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