How to solve Parameter Issue causing Duplicate Content
-
Hi everyone,
My site home page comes up in SERP with following url www.sitename/?referer=indiagrid
My question is:-
Should I disallow using robots.txt.?
or 301 redirect to the home page
Other issue is
i have few dynamic generated URL's for a form
http://www.www.sitename/career-form.php?position=SEO Executive
I am using parameter "position" in URL Parameter in GWT.
But still my pages are indexed that is leading to duplicate page content.
Please help me out.
-
Thanks Tom.
SEOMOZ Community Rocks!
-
It will. It may take a bit of time for it do so, but they should drop relatively quickly. Google is very good at following the canonical directive.
-
Thanks Tom.
One more question,
Will Google drop the duplicate pages from its index after applying canonical tag.?
-
I agree, canonical urls are the way to go with this - unless of course you can draw them into unique urls without variables which may also solve the issue - though not entirely
-
Hi Himanshu
I would not use a 301 redirect or block with the robots.txt file as the dynamic query parameter (basically everything after the "?") may not work if you do that. Your CMS may depend on it, or you may be tracking certain things with the query in analytics (for instance, a client I've worked with uses queries to measure display ad performance). For this reason, I wouldn't redirect.
However, implementing a canonical tag on each page should stop Google indexing any dynamic URLs that are created, which will stop any duplicate content issue. For each page on your site, eg: www.sitename.com, www.sitename.com/page1.html, www.sitename.com/page2.html etc. - have a self-referring canonical tag on each one - basically, include a canonical tag that points to the page you are on. For each example above, that would be:
Get in touch with your dev team or whoever created the website to see if they can implement the tags site-wide. If you're running Wordpress, the Yoast SEO Plugin is a free tool that will do this for you.
Finally, take a look at the SEOMoz guide to canonicals - it's really helpful and will help to explain my points further.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Is this duplicate content that I should be worried about?
Our product descriptions appear in two places and on one page they appear twice. The best way to illustrate that would be to link you to a search results page that features one product. My duplicate content concern refers to the following, When the customer clicks the product a pop-up is displayed that features the product description (first showing of content) When the customer clicks the 'VIEW PRODUCT' button the product description is shown below the buy buytton (second showing of content), this is to do with the template of the page and is why it is also shown in the pop-up. This product description is then also repeated further down in the tabs (third showing of content). My thoughts are that point 1 doesn't matter as the content isn't being shown from a dedicated URL and it relies on javascript. With regards to point 2, is the fact the same paragraph appears on the page twice a massive issue and a duplicate content problem? Thanks
Technical SEO | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Another Duplicate Content - eCommerce Question!
We are manufacturers of about 15 products and our website provides information about the products. We also offer them for sale on the site. Recently we partnered with a large eCommerce site that sells many of these types of products. They lifted descriptions from our site for theirs and are now selling our products. They have higher DA than us. Will this cause a ranking problem for us? Should we write unique descriptions for them? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Chris6610 -
Duplicate Content
HI There, Hoping someone can help me - before i damage my desk banging my head. Getting notifications from ahrefs and Moz for duplicate content. I have no idea where these weird urls have came from , but they do take us to the correct page (but it seems a duplicate of this page). correct url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/Antique-Vintage-Rings-c152.htm Incorrect url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm This is showing for most of our store categories 😞 Desperate for help as to what could be causing these issues. I have a technical member of the ecommerce software go through the large sitemap files and they assured me it wasn't linked to the sitemap files. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Possible duplicate content issue with my Blog and archive pages . Any help greatly appreciated
Dear Mozzers, I have been looking at my news section on my eCommerce site and I think I may have a duplicate content issue and wanted some advice on whether I do and if so , how best I handle this. http://www.website.co.uk/news
Technical SEO | | PeteC12
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:1
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:2
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:3
http://www.website.co.uk/news/limit:9999 (This is show all) I also have the ability of showing articles by month : http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/04 (April)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/03 (March)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/02 (Feb)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/01 (Jan) I am wondering if there's a duplicate issue here or not given that I also articles by month as well and if so how best I handle this.? I already do pagination on my news pages (page 1 , page 2) by using rel=next and rel=Prev but I don't have an canconical or anything as yet. I enclose a couple of links if this would help and would appreciate if someone could take a browse. I have a View All link on my homepage for for all news items - http://goo.gl/JPPIvQ I which have a different urls - March 2015 Articles - http://goo.gl/0O1wYD and April 2015 articles - http://goo.gl/GdW2oK On another note, These articles are also linked to from the relevant category landing pages on my website to help with SEO. I have not used H tags on the article links in my landing pages , just displaying the weblink back to the news article.I've done this to try and improve the PR and rankings of my landing pages. Just wondered if anyone has any comments as to whether thats a good or bad idea and whether I could improve it in any way - An example is here (scroll down the page to the pressure washing guides) - http://goo.gl/nnRE49 Thanks Pete0 -
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
How to fix duplicate content caused by tags?
I use SEMRush, and the issue they are finding is I have 30 duplicate content issues. All seem to be caused by the tags I add in my portfolio pieces. I have looked at my SEO settings (taxonomies, etc) in the Wordpress site, and don't know what I am doing wrong....any advice how to fix? I have attached a screen shot VsYv2wY
Technical SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Duplicate Content on 2 Sites - Advice
We have one client who has an established eCommerce Site and has created another site which has the exact same content which is about to be launched. We want both sites to be indexed but not be penalised for duplicate content. The sites have different domains The sites have the same host We want the current site to be priority, so the new site would not be ranking higher in SERPs. Any advice on setting up canonical, author tags, alternate link tag etc Thanks Rich
Technical SEO | | SEOLeaders0 -
Duplicate Content Errors
Ok, old fat client developer new at SEO so I apologize if this is obvious. I have 4 errors in one of my campaigns. two are duplicate content and two are duplicate title. Here is the duplicate title error Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/Default.aspx So, my question is... What do I need to do to make this right? They are the same page. in my page load for default.aspx I have this: this.Title = "Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information."; And it occurs only once...0