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
-
Moz Insights are raising alarms --Are they useful?
Hi, Moz is alerting us about URLs being too long, titles being too long, and duplicate content. These are mostly for pages with categories of content, or the author bio pages --pages that are included by default with the template we're using in HubSpot. So that there isn't a quick way to make these changes, and anyway the pages are low-value.So my question is, how much are these issues impacting our SEO and domain authority?If these are pages no one visits (like the category and author pages) is there any reason this would be harming our SEO efforts?Thanks!
Moz Pro | | ASCI-Marketing0 -
How can I deal with tag page duplicate issues
The Moz crawler reported some dupliated issues. Many of them have to do with tags.
Moz Pro | | IamKovacs
Each tag has a link, and as some articles are under several tags, these come up as duplicate content. I read Dr Peter's piece on Canonical stuff, but it's not clear to me if any of these are the solution. Perhaps the solution lies somewhere else? Maybe I need to block the robots from these urls (But that seems counter-SEO-productive) Thanks
Kovacs0 -
403 error for a member site
Perhaps a stupid question but SEOmoz registers 403 errors for pages behind a membersite (ie. they are restricted on purpose). Should I noindex these pages or just let SEOmoz register these "errors"?
Moz Pro | | Crunchii0 -
I know our business listed in Yahoo and medranks.com (for example). But my open site explorer report doesn't show those. however on their sites, I see the listing. Why is this?
I know our business listed in Yahoo and medranks.com (for example). But my open site explorer report doesn't show those links on the inbound report. however on their respective sites, I see the listing when I search for us. And the link does work..... Why is this? Why don't I see it on the open site report?
Moz Pro | | cschwartzel0 -
Open Site Explorer Not Working on 99% of Sites
I'm trying to use Open Site Explorer, but whenever I try to I get the error message "Ouch! It Looks Like Something Went South". Interestingly, I don't have this problem when entering a very popular site like google.com, yahoo.com, bbc.co.uk. Is there a problem with the tool at the moment, or something wrong on my end?
Moz Pro | | EssexGirl1 -
Duplicate page title
I own a store www.mzube.co.uk and the scam always says that I have duplicate page titles or duplicate page. What happens is thn I may have for example www.mzube.co.uk/allproducts/page1. And if I hve 20 pages all what will change from each page is the number at the end and all the rest of the page name will be the same but really the pages are if different products. So the scans think I have 20 pages the same but I havent Is this a concern as I don't think I can avoid this Hope you can answer
Moz Pro | | mzube0 -
Why aren't canonical tags reducing duplicate page title/content?
We have canonical tags set up for a feature page on one of our sites. This site has an image gallery controlled by javascript. To aid the user experience the image can also be specified by a URL parameter (the javascript also uses this URL to fetch the images). The SEOMoz report complains that the links to these images have duplicate page titles and content. To try and combat this we set canonical tags to point only to the original page, without the slideshow parameter. e.g. http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=1 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=2 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ The latest SEOMoz report has come back and the errors still exist. What can we do to remove these error messages? Thanks
Moz Pro | | TJSSEO1 -
Duplicate page titles are the same URL listed twice
The system says I have two duplicate page titles. The page titles are exactly the same because the two URLs are exactly the same. These same two identical URLs show up in the Duplicate Page Content also - because they are the same. We also have a blog and there are two tag pags showing identical content - I have blocked the blog in robots.txt now, because the blog is only for writers. I suppose I could have just blocked the tags pages.
Moz Pro | | loopyal0