Parameter Strings & Duplicate Page Content
-
I'm managing a site that has thousands of pages due to all of the dynamic parameter strings that are being generated. It's a real estate listing site that allows people to create a listing, and is generating lots of new listings everyday. The Moz crawl report is continually flagging A LOT (25k+) of the site pages for duplicate content due to all of these parameter string URLs.
Example: sitename.com/listings & sitename.com/listings/?addr=street name
Do I really need to do anything about those pages? I have researched the topic quite a bit, but can't seem to find anything too concrete as to what the best course of action is. My original thinking was to add the rel=canonical tag to each of the main URLs that have parameters attached. I have also read that you can bypass that by telling Google what parameters to ignore in Webmaster tools.
We want these listings to show up in search results, though, so I don't know if either of these options is ideal, since each would cause the listing pages (pages with parameter strings) to stop being indexed, right? Which is why I'm wondering if doing nothing at all will hurt the site?
I should also mention that I originally recommend the rel=canonical option to the web developer, who has pushed back in saying that "search engines ignore parameter strings." Naturally, he doesn't want the extra work load of setting up the canonical tags, which I can understand, but I want to make sure I'm both giving him the most feasible option for implementation as well as the best option to fix the issues.
-
You started by saying the problem is duplicate content. Are those pages with the various parameter strings basically duplicate content? Because if they are, no matter what you do you will probably not get them all to rank; the URL is not your main problem in that case. (Though you still should do something about those parameter strings.)
-
Thanks for the quick response, EGOL. Very helpful.
I'm not at all familiar with your 3rd suggestion in your response. If we were to strip them off at the server level, what would that actually look like? Both in terms of the code that we need to use in .htaccess as well as the resulting change to the URL?
Would that affect the pages and their ability to be indexed? Any potential negative SEO effects from doing this?
Just trying to make sure it's what we need and figure out the best way to relay this to the web developer. Thanks!
-
Do I really need to do anything about those pages?
**In my opinion, YES, absolutely. ** Allowing lots of parameters to persist on your site increases crawling require, dilutes the power to your pages, I believe that your site's rankings will decline over time if these parameters are not killed.
There are three methods to handle it.... redirect, settings in webmaster tools and canonical. These three methods are not equivalent and each works in a very different way.
-
The parameters control in Google Webmaster Tools is unreliable. It did not work for me. And, it does not work for any other search engine. Find a different solution, is what I recommend.
-
Using rel=canonical relies on Google to obey it. From my experience it works well at present time. But we know that Google says how they are going to do things and then changes their mind without tellin' anybody. I would not rely on this.
-
If you really want to control these parameters, use htaccess to strip them off at the server level. That is doing it where you totally control it and not relying on what anybody says that they are going to do. Take control.
The only reservation about #3 is that you might need parameters for on-site search or category page sorting on your own site. These can be excluded from being stripped in your htaccess file.
Don't allow search engines to do anything for you that you can do for yourself. They can screw it up or quit doing it at any time and not say anything about it.
-
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
-
After adding a ssl certificate to my site I encountered problems with duplicate pages and page titles
Hey everyone! After adding a ssl certificate to my site it seems that every page on my site has duplicated it's self. I think that is because it has combined the www.domainname.com and domainname.com. I would really hate to add a rel canonical to every page to solve this issue. I am sure there is another way but I am not sure how to do it. Has anyone else ran into this problem and if so how did you solve it? Thanks and any and all ideas are very appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LovingatYourBest0 -
Woocommerce SEO & Duplicate content?
Hi Moz fellows, I'm new to Woocommerce and couldn't find help on Google about certain SEO-related things. All my past projects were simple 5 pages websites + a blog, so I would just no-index categories, tags and archives to eliminate duplicate content errors. But with Woocommerce Product categories and tags, I've noticed that many e-Commerce websites with a high domain authority actually rank for certain keywords just by having their category/tags indexed. For example keyword 'hippie clothes' = etsy.com/category/hippie-clothes (fictional example) The problem is that if I have 100 products and 10 categories & tags on my site it creates THOUSANDS of duplicate content errors, but If I 'non index' categories and tags they will never rank well once my domain authority rises... Anyone has experience/comments about this? I use SEO by Yoast plugin. Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre1 -
Duplicate content - Images & Attachments
I have been looking a GWT HTML improvements on our new site and I am scratching my head on how to stop some elements of the website showing up as duplicates for Meta Descriptions and Titles. For example the blog area: <a id="zip_0-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CocoonfxmediaThis blog is full of information and resources for you to implement; get more traffic, more leads an
/blog/
/blog/page/2/
/blog/page/3/
/blog/page/4/
/blog/page/6/
/blog/page/9/The page has rel canonicals on them (using Yoast Wordpress SEO) and I can't see away of stopping the duplicate content. Can anyone suggest how to combat this? or is there nothing to worry about?
0 -
If a website trades internationally and simply translates its online content from English to French, German, etc how can we ensure no duplicate content penalisations and still maintain SEO performance in each territory?
Most of the international sites are as below: example.com example.de example.fr But some countries are on unique domains such example123.rsa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dave_Schulhof0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Duplicate content across internation urls
We have a large site with 1,000+ pages of content to launch in the UK. Much of this content is already being used on a .nz url which is going to stay. Do you see this as an issue or do you thin Google will take localised factoring into consideration. We could add a link from the NZ pages to the UK. We cant noindex the pages as this is not an option. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide0 -
Duplicate content
Is there manual intervention required for a site that has been flagged for duplicate content to get back to its original rankings, once the duplicated content has been removed? Background: Our site recently experienced a significant drop in traffic around the time that a chunk of content from other sites (ie. duplicate) went live. While it was not an exact replica of the pages on other sites, there was quite a bit of overlap. That content has since been removed, but our traffic hasn't improved. What else can we do to improve our ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0 -
Affiliate Site Duplicate Content Question
Hi Guys I have been un-able to find a definite answer to this on various forums, your views on this will be very valuable. I am doing a few Amazon affiliate sites and will be pulling in product data from Amazon via a Wordpress plugin. The plugin pulls in titles, descriptions, images, prices etc, however this presents a duplicate content issue and hence I can not publish the product pages with amazon descriptions. Due to the large number of products, it is not feasible to re-write all descriptions, but I plan re-write descriptions and titles for 50% of the products and publish then with “index, follow” attribute. However, for the other 50%, what would be the best way to handle them? Should I publish them as “noindex,follow”? **- Or is there another solution? Many thanks for your time.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0