Using Rel Nofollow on Duplicate Pages
-
Hi there,
I have a rather large site that has duplicate content on many pages due to how it's being spidered by google. I was hoping I could set the internal link to this page as "nofollow."
My question is that I have hundreds of other sites with backlinks to these duplicate content pages.. will this affect me negatively if I tell google not to index the duplicated pages?
-
Nofollow is no longer a way to block indexing of internal links. External yes, internal no.
Chad's answer about canonicals is a good one. Depending on how/why the duplicate pages are created/required example, sort orders or page 2, page 3, page 4 of the same page, you also have a couple of other options:
- Managing url paramaters in Google Webmaster Tools http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
- Googles rel next and rel prev tags http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
-
Cheers - great answer thanks!
-
I found this page within SEO MOZ that answers the link juice question:
"Will this pass 100% of the link juice from a given page to another? More or less than a 301 redirect does now? Note that Google's official representative from the web spam team, Matt Cutts, said today that it passes link juice akin to a 301 redirect but also noted (when SEOmoz's ownGillian Muessig asked specifically) that "it loses no more juice than a 301," which suggests that there is some fractional loss when either of these are applied."
-
Add this to the top of your pages that you feel have the same content somewhere else on the website.
As far as the backlinks, I am not sure how that will pan-out. In theory they should still flow. I'll have to double check and make sure. However, duplicate content is a big issue. I deal with it on a national level and it is a total nightmare, especially when the site is very large-dynamically produce by a cms that is not seo friendly.
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
-
Pros and Cons of using rel=next on blog posts
Hi there, at the bottom of my website's blog posts the rel=prev and rel=next tags are used on links that point to the previous article that was posted and the next article that was posted. Often these articles are not 'linked' in terms of their content or message. Is this the correct use of rel=next/prev and if not what are the possible negative effects. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | Bee1590 -
Duplicate Page Titles Across Portfolio Items
Hi, Quick question about duplicate page titles. I have a few duplicate pages where I've got lots of portfolio items under the same category, lets call it a portfolio of kangaroos. I can see there are separate URLs for each of the pages, i.e, www.blahblah.com/portfolio/kangaroos and www.blahblah.com/portfolio/kangaroos/2, but they both have the same page title, i.e, Kangaroos Portfolio | Domain and it's coming up in Moz as a medium priority duplicate page title error. Where in WordPress can I change the page title for the second page of portfolio items? Thanks very much! Tom.
Technical SEO | | onefoursix0 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Why are the bots still picking up so many links on our page despite us adding nofollow?
We have been working to reduce our on-page links issue. On a particular type of page the problem arose because we automatically link out to relevant content. When we added nofollows to this content it resolved the issue for some but not all and we can't figure out why is was not successful for every one. Can you see any issues? Example of a page where nofollow did not work for... http://www.andor.com/learning-academy/4-5d-microscopy-an-overview-of-andor's-solutions-for-4-5d-microscopy
Technical SEO | | tonykelly0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Is it bad to have your pages as .php pages?
Hello everyone, Is it bad to have your website pages indexed as .php? For example, the contact page is site.com/contact.php and not /contact. Does this affect your SEO rankings in any way? Is it better to have your pages without the extension? Also, if I'm working with a news site and the urls are dynamic for every article (ie site.com/articleid=2323.) Should I change all of those dynamic urls to static? Thank You.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Rel next prev, should i nofollow pagination links
Hi Everyone. When implementing rel next and prev on pagination pages, should I make the pagination links themselves no followed? Have seen people saying yes and no so just want a final answer! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Using robots.txt to deal with duplicate content
I have 2 sites with duplicate content issues. One is a wordpress blog. The other is a store (Pinnacle Cart). I cannot edit the canonical tag on either site. In this case, should I use robots.txt to eliminate the duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0