Tags, Categories, & Duplicate Content
-
Looking for some advice on a duplicate content issue that we're having that definitely isn't unique to us.
See, we are allowing all our tag and category pages, as well as our blog pagination be indexed and followed, but Moz is detecting that all as duplicate content, which is obvious since it is the same content that is on our blog posts.
We've decided in the past to keep these pages the way they are as it hasn't seemed to hurt us specifically and we hoped it would help our overall ranking. We haven't seen positive or negative signals either way, just the warnings from Moz.
We are wondering if we should noindex these pages and if that could cause a positive change, but we're worried it might cause a big negative change as well.
Have you confronted this issue? What did you decide and what were the results?
Thanks in advance!
-
Erica, Thank you for sticking with this and continuing to share your thoughts. It's very helpful and much appreciated!
-
Thanks Erica.
We're deindexing the tags pages for now and going to see what happens. If all goes well, we might deindex the category pages as well.
Thanks!
-
EGOL is definitely correct that those pages can hold a ton of value if a brand/company has the time/resources/bandwidth to optimize them. Most don't, so it's better to noindex than have duplicate and/or thin content category pages. But if you can and will optimize, do it!
-
That makes sense. But I really want to make sure I (and others) understand because of EGOL's earlier referenced comments (June 2011).
"If I kept my category pages out of the search indexes I would be walking away from hundreds of search engine visitors per minute.
Do analytics to see how much traffic is coming into these pages from search, who is linking to them, how much revenue they earn and also consider their future traffic potential.
Its not good to follow generalized advice blindly." and (February 2012) ...
"I have two wordpress blogs and category pages are where most of my search engine traffic enters. Some bring in thousands per month. Most of my post pages bring in very little traffic.
If you are not having any problem with duplicate content at present maybe it would be a good idea to allow indexing of the main page, the post pages and the category pages. They if you do have a duplicate content problem you can remove from the index the pages that bring in the least amount of traffic."
So is the key then, ensuring the category pages contain unique content in addition to whatever else is on the category pages? I would have thought the mere fact that you're creating a unique combination of unique content by the grouping excerpts from identically tagged posts might have been enough. That content would also get updated each time a new post gets published.
I'd appreciate your thoughts on this Erica.
-
You can either choose to deindex pages one by one or deindex the whole subfolder.
Since usually category pages have the same content as or a preview of the content on your other pages, this doesn't affect your long tail traffic as that traffic will go to the other pages. Usually the problem with category pages is that the content's thin or duplicate. Now, you can make content just for category pages and keep them to drive traffic to. I worked in e-commerce pre-Moz and we wanted to rank/land people on category pages, such as women's shirts, and made unique, solid content for those page.
-
This is certainly what we've heard and it's good to hear of a real case where you went from indexing to noindexing. My bet is that we would have the same result, my hope is that we would have an increase over time, and my fear is that we'll have a decrease.
-
We do upgrade our blog twice a week and keep a pretty good spread across our categories and tags.
The hope is that we'll have the boost you mentioned, in long-tail and whatnot, but the fear is that it could hurt us (like Erica mentioned above).
Like Erica, we haven't seen any negativity, but we wonder if we're being affected without even knowing it and by setting them to noindex we could potentially get a boost. It's a dream, we just don't want the opposite to happen.
-
Erica, shouldn't the decision to noindex category pages be done on a case-by-case basis? If the blog has few posts, or if posts aren't updated frequently, then the chance of category pages being viewed as thin increases and it would make sense to noindex them.
If, on the other hand:
- category pages have different content from that of the main blog page;
- the main blog and category pages use excerpts;
- tag, archive and author pages are noindexed;
- and frequent updates;
doesn't it then make a case to index category pages? They can be a rich source of long-tail keywords and therefore a good draw for new entrants to the site as explained in this earlier Q&A post.
-
It's highly recommend that you noindex category, tag, archives, and author pages in WordPress. (I assume you're using WP; though there are many similar blogging platforms out there.) The reason is because these pages come across as thin and/or duplicate content, and you are risking getting hit by Panda. Now that doesn't always happen. My own personal blog had these pages indexed for a very long time, and I didn't have any problems. But I also didn't seen any problems when I did deindex them. But I don't get a ton of traffic, and I'm sure traffic to, popularity of site, and competitive nature all factor into Google's radar.
-
Hi Bradjn, With duplicate content i would go for the use of canonicals. Give the original page and its duplicates the same cannonical url, so searchengines will know what's the original and (most of the time) won't see it as duplicate.
Here some more about duplicate content and also canonicals: http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
I can't give you a good answer about using noindex or this wil be a positive change. Did you check in webmastertools about duplicates? or only MOZ?
Grtz, Leonie
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
-
I have duplicate content but // are causing them
I have 3 pages duplicated just by a / Example: https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**//**
Technical SEO | | Renalynd
https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**/** What would cause this?? And how would I fix it? Thanks! Rena0 -
Index.php duplicate content
Hi, new here. Im looking for some help with htaccess file. index.php is showing duplicate content errors with: mysite.com/index.php mysite.com/ mysite.com ive managed to use the following code to remove the www part of the url: IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Technical SEO | | klsdnflksdnvl
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] but how can i redirect the mysite.com/index.php and mysite.com/ to mysite.com. Please help0 -
How to protect against duplicate content?
I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Duplicate Content on Product Pages
Hello I'm currently working on two sites and I had some general question's about duplicate content. For the first one each page is a different location, but the wording is identical on each; ie it says Instant Remote Support for Critical Issues, Same Day Onsite Support with a 3-4 hour response time, etc. Would I get penalized for this? Another question i have is, we offer Antivirus support for providers ie Norton, AVG,Bit Defender etc. I was wondering if we will get penalized for having the same first paragraph with only changing the name of the virus provider on each page? My last question is we provide services for multiple city's and towns in various states. Will I get penalized for having the same content on each page, such as towns and producuts and services we provide? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ilyaelbert0 -
Duplicate Content Issue with
Hello fellow Moz'rs! I'll get straight to the point here - The issue, which is shown in the attached image, is that for every URL ending in /blog/category/name, it has a duplicate page of /blog/category/name/?p=contactus. Also, its worth nothing that the ?p=contact us are not in the SERPs but were crawled by SEOMoz and they are live and duplicate. We are using Pinnacle cart. Is there a way to just stop the crawlers from ?p=contactus or? Thank you all and happy rankings, James
Technical SEO | | JamesPiper0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Duplicate content across multiple domains
I have come across a situation where we have discovered duplicate content between multiple domains. We have access to each domain and have recently within the past 2 weeks added a 301 redirect to redirect each page dynamically to the proper page on the desired domain. My question relates to the removal of these pages. There are thousands of these duplicate pages. I have gone back and looked at a number of these cached pages in google and have found that the cached pages that are roughly 30 days old or older. Will these pages ever get removed from google's index? Will the 301 redirect even be read by google to be redirected to the proper domain and page? If so when will that happen? Are we better off submitting a full site removal request of the sites that carries the duplicate content at this point? These smaller sites do bring traffic on their own but I'd rather not wait 3 months for the content to be removed since my assumption is that this content is competing with the main site. I suppose another option would be to include no cache meta tag for these pages. Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmsobe0 -
Duplicate content issues caused by our CMS
Hello fellow mozzers, Our in-house CMS - which is usually good for SEO purposes as it allows all the control over directories, filenames, browser titles etc that prevent unwieldy / meaningless URLs and generic title tags - seems to have got itself into a bit of a tiz when it comes to one of our clients. We have tried solving the problem to no avail, so I thought I'd throw it open and see if anyone has a soultion, or whether it's just a fault in our CMS. Basically, the SEs are indexing two identical pages, one ending with a / and the other ending /index.php, for one of our sites (www.signature-care-homes.co.uk). We have gone through the site and made sure the links all point to just one of these, and have done the same for off-site links, but there is still the duplicate content issue of both versions getting indexed. We also set up an htaccess file to redirect to the chosen version, but to no avail, and we're not sure canonical will work for this issue as / pages should redirect to /index.php anyway - and that's we can't work out. We have set the access file to point to index.php, and that should be what should be happening anyway, but it isn't. Is there an alternative way of telling the SE's to only look at one of these two versions? Also, we are currently rewriting the content and changing the structure - will this change the situation we find ourselves in?
Technical SEO | | themegroup0