The same "About" page on multiple WordPress microsites
-
Hello there,
I have over 10 WordPress websites that all have the same "About" page because the same company. I have concerns that this will adversely affect my sites and i'm looking for the best way to deal with this.
I was either going to remove the "About" page with Google Webmaster Tools and robots.txt or use the canonical meta tag on that page.
Any thoughts?
-
Thanks for your help Marie. I think I'll add the canonical tag to all the "About" pages leading to the original page like you said.
-
If it's just one page that does this it's not likely to make a HUGE deal. Google will take the one that they feel should rank best and rank that one. The others likely won't display in the SERPS.
The fear, I am guessing, is Panda. Now, if there are multiple pages on your sites that have duplicate content, then having the about page duplicated is one more straw on the camel's back.
With all of that being said, if it is appropriate, this is probably a good place to use a rel canonical tag and point it to the About Us page on the main site. This will tell Google that only that one page should be in the index.
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
-
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://moz.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
Multiple h1 tags on this html 5 page a issue?
Hi Guys, I have a html5 page located here: https://tinyurl.com/yc6s3xs2 I know from some online discussions having multiple h1 tags on HTML 5 pages like this, shouldn't be an issue. Any thoughts on this? Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
When i search for my domain name - google asks "did you mean" - why?
Hi all, I just noticed something quite odd - if i do a search for my domain name (see: http://goo.gl/LBc1lz) google shows my domain as first result, but it also asks "did i mean" and names another website with very similar name. the other site has far lower PA/DA according to Moz, any ideas why google is doing this? and more inportantly how i could stop it? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Subcategories within "New Arrivals" section - duplicate content?
Hi there, My client runs an e-commerce store selling shoes that features a section called "New Arrivals" with subcategories, such as "shoes," "wedges," "boots," "sandals," etc. There are already main subcategories on the site that target these terms. These are specifically pages for "New Arrivals - Boots," etc. The shoes listed on each new arrivals subcategory page are also listed in the main subcategory page. Given that there is not really any search volume for "Brand + new arrivals in boots," but lots of search volume for "Brand + boots," what is the proper way to handle these new arrivals subcategory pages? Should each subcategory have a rel=canonical tag pointing to the main subcategory? Should they be de-indexed? Should I keep them all indexed but try to make the content as unique as possible? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain
Dear Mozers, First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year ! I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too. Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of. How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time? To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site? Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed. What are your opinions about this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
When you add 10.000 pages that have no real intention to rank in the SERP, should you: "follow,noindex" or disallow the whole directory through robots? What is your opinion?
I just want a second opinion 🙂 The customer don't want to loose any internal linkvalue by vaporizing link value though a big amount of internal links. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Biggest Benefit for Footer Links "Created by ___?"
Greetings Mozzers, I wanted to see how I can get the most bang for my buck in regards to footer links back to my site. I understand that the footer is one of the weakest areas for links, however, I have many sites that I have done and want to get the most benefit from the footer area where I say created by etc. First Question: Is there a chance to get some value at of this area? Second Question: What is the best structure to use to get the most benefit from this opportunity? If there is zero value within this region and I can't get any benefit, would the following penalize me? Current Structure Used: Powered by MonsterWeb (On hover the title tag reveals a small 10 word sentence about us.) Additional clarification would be greatly apprecaited.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Multiple URL's exist for the same page, canonicaliazation issue?
All of the following URL's take me to the same page on my site: 1. www.mysite.com/category1/subcategory.aspx 2. www.mysite.com/subcategory.aspx 3. www.mysite.com/category1/category1/category1/subcategory.aspx All of those pages are canonicalized to #1, so is that okay? I was told the following my a company trying to make our sitemap: "the site's platform dynamically creates URLs that resolve as 200 and should be 404. This is a huge spider trap for any search engine and will make them wary of crawling the site." What would I need to do to fix this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0