Duplicate Content Issue from using filters on a directory listing site
-
I have a directory listing site of harpists and have alot of issues coming up that say:
Content that is identical (or nearly identical) to content on other pages of your site forces your pages to unnecessarily compete with each other for rankings.
Because this is a directory listing site the content is quite generic.The main issue appears to be coming from the functionality of the page. It appears that the "spider" is picking up each different choice of filter as a new page? If you have a look at this link you will see what I mean.
People searching the site can filter the results of the songs played by this harpist by changing the dropdowns etc... but for some reason the filter arguments are being picked up...? Do you have any good approaches to solving this issue?
A similar issue comes from the video pages for each harpist. They are being flagged as identical content - as there are currently no videos on the page.
|
http://www.find-a-harpist.co.uk/user/39/videos
|
http://www.find-a-harpist.co.uk/user/37/videos
|
Do you have any suggestions?
Many thanks for taking the time to read this and respond.
| | | | | |
| | -
Thank you both for you responses. Yes the site is relatively new. I shall implement your suggestions and hopefully they will do teh trick.
-
Is your site relatively new? I currently show no pages in the Google index at all, which makes the duplicate content issue a bit moot (at least in the short-term). The search filters and pagination are a bit different issues. You could META NOINDEX any pages with the filter parameters active, or rel-canonical them to the unfiltered version (as @Steve25 said). Since no pages are indexed yet, you could also just "nofollow" the filter links ("Title", etc.), which should help prevent those filtered versions getting crawled. Pagination (pages 2+ of search) is a trickier issue, but it might be best to just NOINDEX, FOLLOW those. You could also let Google know in Google Webmaster Tools that that page= parameter is for pagination (I've had that be hit-or-miss, but it is easy, relative to other solutions). For the empty profiles, it really depends on the scope. If you have a lot, I'd ideally want to code them to have META NOINDEX if they're empty. You can lift the NOINDEX once they have content posted. You'd have to do that dynamically, but it shouldn't be too tricky. That way, Google would see new pages only once they have some content in place.
-
Could you set up canonical tags so that when users select certain criteria a parent page is shown in the canonical?
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
-
Syntax for canonical tag for a default page in a sub directory (not subdomain) of a web site?
I'm getting two "no canonical tag" errors for the default page of a sub-directory default page (www and root) - again NOT a subdomain. Since the page is not the root of its own site, I tagged it as -- I have tried without the default.asp, but the error remains. Been doing this for 24 years and don't remember running across this before.
Moz Pro | | dcmike0 -
New pages on my web site
I have created web sites that appear somewhere on Google in hardly any time at all, but I appear to have forgotten something or things are different for pages added recently to an existing website. I have added a page on a particular subject, optimized it using on page grader, so that I get an A, and a check mark for everything except H1 tags and rel=canonical which my web hosting provider does not support. I do have a check mark for accessible to search engines The page has the format http://www.domain.com/specific-keyword It is in the menu, so should have internal links to it, as I understand it. I have created a new site map, and submitted it in webmaster tools. Interestingly it says that of the 96 pages only 76 were indexed is this a clue? and why would they not index a page I have then shared the page on google plus, facebook, tumblr, pinterest and twitter and some others In OSE it comes up as domain authority 28 page authority 1, the social media shares do show up in metrics on the right but no links internal or external are shown, they do on other pages I created in the same way. Is it just a case of waiting or is their something I do to help thank you
Moz Pro | | singingtelegramsuk0 -
How to Avoid Duplicate Page Content errors when using Wordpress Categories & Tags?
I get a lot of duplicate page errors on my crawl diagnostics reports from 'categories' and 'tags' on my wordpress sites. The post is 1x link and then the content is 'duplicated' on the 'category' or 'tag' that is added to the page. Should I exclude the tags and categories from my sitemap or are these issues not that important? Thanks for your help Stacey
Moz Pro | | skehoe1 -
Error in Moz duplicate content reports
Hi - I've run the Moz campaign on a client's site. Moz is saying that there are duplicate content errors, and when I look at the errors it is showing that they are all to do with the non-www URLs having being duplicated in the www form of the URLs. However this is not the case - all the non-www URLs are all 301 redirected to the www URLs. Is this an error in the Moz tool? Has anybody experienced something similar?
Moz Pro | | rorynatkiel0 -
Re : Duplicate Content
Hello, I am a pro member, in my campaign it says duplicate content for few urls. which i m not able to understand, because both the url's are same but why its showing under duplicate content. here are the urls example. http://www.giftbig.com/helios-gift-card.html http://www.giftbig.com/helios-gift-card.html/
Moz Pro | | dasjoy850 -
Changing the way SEOmoz Detects Duplicate Content
Hey everyone, I wanted to highlight today's blog post in case you missed it. In short, we're using a different algorithm to detect duplicate pages. http://moz.com/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages If you see a change in your crawl results and you haven't done anything, this is probably why. Here's more information taken directly from the post: 1. Fewer duplicate page errors: a general decrease in the number of reported duplicate page errors. However, it bears pointing out that: **We may still miss some near-duplicates. **Like the current heuristic, only a subset of the near-duplicate pages is reported. **Completely identical pages will still be reported. **Two pages that are completely identical will have the same simhash value, and thus a difference of zero as measured by the simhash heuristic. So, all completely identical pages will still be reported. 2. Speed, speed, speed: The simhash heuristic detects duplicates and near-duplicates approximately 30 times faster than the legacy fingerprints code. This means that soon, no crawl will spend more than a day working its way through post-crawl processing, which will facilitate significantly faster delivery of results for large crawls.
Moz Pro | | KeriMorgret2 -
Page Authority is the same on every page of my site
I'm analyzing a site and the page authority is the exact same for every page in the site. How can this be since the page authority is supposed to be unique to each page?
Moz Pro | | azjayhawk0 -
How can a site have a backlink from Barclays website?
Hi, I have entered a competitiors website www.my-wardrobe.com into Open Site to see who they get links from and to my surprise they have a load from Barclays Business Banking. When I visit the page I can not see the links. But if I search the pages source code for my-wardrobe, there I have it, a link to my-wardrobe.com. How have they done this? Surely Barclays haven't sold them it? And more so, why are they receiving link juice when you cant even see the link on the Barclays page in question - http://www.barclays.co.uk/BusinessBanking/P1242557952664 Thanks | |
Moz Pro | | YNWA
| | <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>http://www.my-wardrobe.com" class="popup" title="Link opens in a new window" rel='' onmousedown="dcsMultiTrack('DCS.dcsuri','BusinessBankingfromBarclays/Footer/wwwmywardrobecom', 'WT.ti', '','WT.dl','1');"> |
| | www.my-wardrobe.com |
| |
|
| | |0