Duplicate Content & Tags
-
I've recently added tags to my blog posts so that related blog posts are suggested to visitors.
My understanding was that my robot.txt was handling duplicate content so thought it wouldn't be an issue but after Moz crawled by site this week is reported 56 issues of duplicate content in my blog.
I'm using Shopify, so I can edit the robot.txt file but is my understanding correct that if there are 2 or more tags then they will be ignored? I've searched the Shopify documents and forum and can't find a straight answer. My understanding of SEO is fairly limited.
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b -
If the only option is to disallow via the robots.txt, then I would agree with your setup - disallow the slugs specific to the tags you don't want indexed. I've heard shopify is a little rough to work with sometimes because of the limitations, so whatever you can do I think is better than nothing. Remember that the robots exclusion is treated as a suggestion and not a command, so if it's possible to assign a no-index meta tag to those URL types that would be best case.
Looks like you're on the right track with the post below:
{ % if handle contains "tagged" % }
{ % endif % }
The one suggestion I would make is that you use noindex,follow so the content will still be crawled, but the duplicate tag won't get indexed. That would create multiple paths to the content on your site, but not create an index bloat issue with multiple tags.
-
Yoast is a WordPress plugin, not Shopify so that option isn't available with the current CMS. Just wanted to chime in to make sure others aren't looking for Yoast SEO in the Shopify app store.
-
I'm using Meta Tagger as the SEO plugin, I've not heard of Yoast SEO but will certainly check it out.
I understand that I need to exclude the tags from being crawled and think I might have worked it out but I'm not 100% sure, as I mentioned my understanding is fairly limited.
My URL which is being seen as duplicate content looks like this
http://www.tangled-yarn.co.uk/blogs/news/tagged/sock-knitting
If I exclude the handle 'tagged' from being index this should work. I think the code should be
{ % if handle contains "tagged" % }
{ % endif % }
Do you think this will work?
-
Do you use Yoast SEO, or another plugin? The key is to set tags to no index so that the crawler only goes through your category links. The issue is that your tag URLs are being indexed and you don't want that. The option is under XML site map.
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
-
Community Discussion: Can 10x content be short-form content?
In his (intentionally very short) post on Tuesday, Rand makes the case that long-form content isn't necessarily great content: "Rather than applying a tactic like long-form content universally or setting length as the bar (or even a metric) for greatness, we instead match our content to our audience's needs and our business/personal goals. 700 more words will not help you reach your goals any more than 7 more words. Create content that helps people. Do it efficiently. Never write an ultimate guide where a single image could more powerfully convey the same value. Trust me; your audience and your bottom line will thank you." I think this is something we all struggle with as online marketers, in one way or another. As someone who casually consumes online content on a regular basis, this also resonates with me on a personal level. I'm curious, what are your hesitations with focusing on shorter-form content that packs a wallop, and what excites you about it? Can you think of any examples of content you've come across that you consider 10x short-form content?
Content Development | | Christy-Correll7 -
Knowledge base for seo, announcing new articles on blog (dupe content)
Hi all, Im thinking of creating a knowledge base with all many asked questions in my company. This could be a great Link-bait source but also nice ranking opportunities i think. But sometimes some new articles are so actual that i also want to blog them.
Content Development | | mdkay
Can i for example double post them (or post a big excerpt) on the blog and canonicalise it to the KB article?
Will links to the blog have equal value to KB links? And will this work?0 -
Does aggregating content hurt your moz / google rank?
I have a news section on my site that I aggregate from multiple RSS feeds. They are stored on my site and I have sitemap that links to them. Is this a negative thing to do? Since its overall duplicate content to another site, it may be a strike against me. Should I just leave it as an updating feed and not keep the articles visible on my site?
Content Development | | BrickPicker0 -
Tools to created embedded content...
Wondering if anyone has done this before,, this so, would they mind sharing the best approach please. To cut a long story short, one of our seo client is a free UK internet safety resource, backed by (but independent from the UK Govt), the site is heavily talked about by sites such as BBC, Guardian and many more newspapers and as a result the domain authority is creeping up to 90 - Oh to be given the chance to monetise a site with DA 90!!! As you can imagine, with the quality of the links the site picks up, the ranking of content on the site can be fairly easy, but the one problem we are facing is that of sites 'borrowing' our content. These sites tend not to be small bedroom bloggers, but rather all kinds of sites. We have seen our content on UK University websites, Police websites and many more whom should know better. Obviously this is hurting the 'borrower' more than us with regard to duplicate content but it would still be good to get some credit for our work without having to keep hunting the sites down and emailing back and forth. We don't need the credit for backlink purposes but would be nice to have people know we read it incase they want to read more. A solution I have pondered is to create embed options, as per youtube et al. Instead of sites having to copy our content to list it, they can still include our content on their site and avoid any duplicate content issues. As I believe the embedded content will be called from our site (I think that's how a youtube video works) our site would also get the read stats on the content regardless of where is it located. We are hoping that this could become a great content distribution tool, we don't need people to come to our site as the site is non profit, has no advertising but we need to justify the resources we get by showing how many people are reading what we publish. We are never going to be able to stop sites using our content so, like the music industry and itunes, if we can find a legal way to do it then we can all benefit. My main question, yes, I do actually have one!!!, is two fold. Is it possible to create embed for whole articles and am i right in my thinking that if our content is on Jeff's Blog and loaded as an embed then the hit on the content is still reflected in our stats as the content is being pulled from our url? Sorry for the excessively long way of explaining this, any feedback is welcomed, even 'don't do it, it's stupid idea'!!
Content Development | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Is paid content a good or bad thing
Hi, over the past couple of years we have turned down thousands of request from companies to have paid editorial on our sites, I have always turned this down but i have seen some sites accept this and would like to know your stance on this. In newspapers and magazines which i have worked in both, they have paid editorial all the time, so i am just wondering what google thinks of paid editorial. look forward to hearing your thoughts
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Will Scrape Content Become Unique Content
I always scrape content from article directories and make it unique through TBS with copyscape passed but i still want to know will google detect the content is not unique.. I unable to write content myself because somewhat english problem.. i know there is lots of cheap article writer available but still is there any way to success ?
Content Development | | mamuti0 -
Blog and Website = 2 different URL's - Is it WORTH to merge content on to one site
Good day Mozzers! A friend of mine recently asked for my help in regards to online marketing. While getting familiar with his online presence, I realized that he has a blog hosted under a completely different URL Main Site = http://pardons.org/ (page rank 4)
Content Development | | vip4service
Blog = http://pardons.wordpress.com/ (page rank 3) What I am battling with is whether or not he should take all of the blog content he has, and merge it on to his main site. It has over 280+ blog posts spanning over a few years, so there is A LOT of content that could benefit his main site. However is it worth it, or should he continue to run everything as 2 different sites? Also, of you suggest moving the content over, what would be the best way to do it in your opinion? He currently has links on his blog TO his main site, so there is a little bit of link juice there, but with a average of 300 views a day, he only get about 10 clicks to his main site from the blog. Thanks a ton for your help!0 -
Duplicate Page Content WordPress blog with categories?
Just got a crawl report back from SEOmoz and it gives me lots of errors for "duplicate page content". Upon investigating, I notice this is because my WP blog is setup into categories so the home page is almost identical to one of the category pages. None of my actually posts are the same but the category pages have some overlap since the same post could show up in two or more categories. Is this a problem or can I just ignore this error? Any thing I should be doing differently? Thanks!
Content Development | | frankthetank20