Duplicate Titles for Large Lists
-
Our blog (www.cowleyweb.com/blog) has recently been given topic categories so we can utilize our old blogs. Otherwise, users would only see what's new and never look back (our blogs are organized by the month they were published) and all that hard work would kind of be a waste after a while.
So we came up with a few topics (i.e. social media, internet marketing, etc.) and adding those as tags to blogs. Now, users can click the topics and get a results page on our blog of all the previously published blogs related to that topic. Sounds great.
BUT, it's hurting our SEO crawl report. If the list goes beyond one page of search results, the 2nd and subsequent pages get dinged as "duplicate title" b/c they share the same title (i.e. "Social Media"). How can I fix this?
I'm not the web designer but something tells me maybe some sort of tag that says "Page 2" or something would do the trick. We use Drupal which is good for customization.
I assume tons of bloggers and websites have dealt with this problem.
Please help. Want to give the web guy some solutions.
Thank you.
-
I have never used it but try implementing the Smart Paging module + Tokens - http://drupal.org/project/smart_paging
-
I would suggest going to Analytics, segmenting by organic search traffic, and seeing if anyone has landed on those pages from search results in the last 2-3 months. If Google is not returning them in search results, and they are not bringing traffic, Google usually favors cleaning pages out of the index that don't need to be there.
If you don't want to noindex them, you can add "Page 2" etc to the title tags to eliminate the duplicate title errors in the crawl report.
-Dan
-
Talked to our web designer. He said he's nervous about no-indexing as if Google will get suspicious and it will hurt more than be a solution. Don't know what to say.
-
Hey There
Sounds like you are all set - just want to add that the type of page you're referring to: page/2 etc is "subpages" and you'll also want to look into noindexing those as well, in addition to "tags" and "categories". That should also fix the errors you're seeing in the Moz report.
-Dan
-
Thanks guys! That's awesome. Forwarding to our developer.
-
It's usually suggested that Tag archives and Category archives be set to NoIndex which will help in alleviating this issue.
-
This sounds like a Drupal/CMS issue. if Drupal doesn't have a fix natively, i'm sure a 3rd developer may have a solution:
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
-
Will Google Judge Duplicate Content on Responsive Pages to be Keyword Spamming?
I have a website for my small business, and hope to improve the search results position for 5 landing pages. I recently modified my website to make it responsive (mobile friendly). I was not able to use Bootstrap; the layout of the pages is a bit unusual and doesn't lend itself to the options Bootstrap provides. Each landing page has 3 main div's - one for desktop, one for tablet, one for phone.
Web Design | | CurtisB
The text content displayed in each div is the same. Only one of the 3 div’s is visible; the user’s screen width determines which div is visible. When I wrote the HTML for the page, I didn't want each div to have identical text. I worried that
when Google indexed the page it would see the same text 3 times, and would conclude that keyword spamming was occurring. So I put the text in just one div. And when the page loads jQuery copies the text from the first div to the other two div's. But now I've learned that when Google indexes a page it looks at both the page that is served AND the page that is rendered. And in my case the page that is rendered - after it loads and the jQuery code is executed – contains duplicate text content in three div's. So perhaps my approach - having the served page contain just one div with text content – fails to help, because Google examines the rendered page, which has duplicate text content in three div's. Here is the layout of one landing page, as served by the server. 1000 words of text goes here. No text. jQuery will copy the text from div id="desktop" into here. No text. jQuery will copy the text from div id="desktop" into here. ===================================================================================== My question is: Will Google conclude that keyword spamming is occurring because of the duplicate content the rendered page contains, or will it realize that only one of the div's is visible at a time, and the duplicate content is there only to achieve a responsive design? Thank you!0 -
Pointless copy on product list pages makes me feel compromised...
When working on ecommerce websites we insist that product list pages need at least 250 words of copy that is optimised for our keyword phrase ... lets say "17 inch bike frames". So we have some crappy copy written that goes something like this.... "We have a great 17 inch bike frame for you whatever your requirement. Take a look at the frames below .... blah blah blah totally pointless text blah blah blah........." This text is of no use to the user as the page is merely a means of them getting to a suitable product page. However, the copy is pretty essential if we want to rank well for "17 inch bike frames" and not having copy on product list pages could land us in hot water with Panda ...especially if we have lots of them on a site using the same page template and with no copy on them. Does anyone else feel uneasy with adding this crappy text to pages? It's only there for search engines and that is something that Google say's we shouldn't do but I know for sure they're not going to rank me as well if I don't have it. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinion on this. It's always annoyed me. Does anyone have any good tips for making this type of copy on product list pages less forced and crappy?
Web Design | | QubaSEO0 -
Google result showing old Meta Title / Description even though page view source shows new info.
Hey guys! I'm struggling with why Google is ignoring my Meta Title / Description. I made a pretty drastic change to both about a week ago and on the results it hasn't changed. I'm on first page with several keywords and I think this weird caching is hurting me on where I'm at on the page. Thoughts / Ideas?
Web Design | | curtis_williams0 -
How to provide product information without duplicate content?
Hi all, I have an ecommerce website with approx 400 products, these are quite technical products and i use to have helpful information about the products on the product pages... My SEO company told me to remove all this, as i had lots of duplicate content issues... I have since had content writers re-write all product descriptions (about 250 words per product)... and now i am trying to figure out a way of getting the "helpful" information back on but in some kind of dynamic way... There is basically about 5 or 6 blocks of information, that can be added to each product page, these overlap hundreds of products. i was thinking of perhaps creating a separate static page for each block of useful information, and putting links on the product pages to this... however, ideally i would prefer to not keep sending customers to other pages... so wanted to see if others had come across similar issues themselves and how they went about having this "content" available to the user but in such a way it was not duplicate content... Please note using images would not be any good here, as the content varies in size but most of it is text based... regards James
Web Design | | isntworkdull1 -
Which Content Causes Duplicate Content Errors
My Duplicate Content list starts off with this URL: http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/bellevue-medical-center-logo Then it lists the five below as Duplicate Content: http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/fonts http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/clear-zone http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/social-media http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/order-stationery http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/logo I do notice that most of these pages have images and/or little or no content outside of our sites template. Is this causing SEOmoz to see it as duplicate? Should I use noindex, follows to fix this? This error is happening with branding pages so noindex is an option. What should I do if that's not an option? Should I change our mega menus to be ajax driven to so the links aren't showing up in the code of every page?
Web Design | | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine0 -
Duplicate H1 tag IF it holds SAME text?
Hello people, I know that majority of SEO gurus (?) claim that H1 tag should only be used once per page. In the landing page design I'm working with, we actually need to repeat our core message stated in H1 & H2 - at the bottom of the page. Now the question is: Can that in any way cause any ranking penalty from big G? In my eyes that is not attempt to over optimize page as it contains SAME info as the H1 & H2 at the top of the page. Confusing, so I'm hope that some SEO gurus here will share some light on this. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | RetroOnline0 -
Duplicate Page Content mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html MOZ Dashboard
According to MOZ Dashboard my site shows Duplicate Page Content mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html .What i can do for that .redirect mysite.com/index.html to mysite.com .then how can i do that using .htaccess file .
Web Design | | innofidelity0 -
Title Element length too long?
My site automatically builds a title element basic by taking the forum thread title and adding the board description to it. Let's use a fictional site as "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums" in this example. A user makes a post titled "Transmission Problems" then the automatically created title would be: Transmission Problems | Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums The process seems to be helpful. Overall thread ranking is good. The added words provide value to users searching for information as "Transmission Problems" is too vague, whereas by adding Chevy Corvette the search can be optimized better. The only issue is a small percent of my pages are being flagged by reporting tools with "Title Element Too Long" So I wish to ask, is there any real harm in this case? Google will simply truncate the title, right?
Web Design | | RyanKent0