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
-
I'm doing a crawl analysis for a website and finding all these duplicate URLs with "null" being added to them and have no clue what could be causing this.
Does anyone know what could be causing this? Our dev team thinks it's caused by mobile pages they created a while ago but it is adding 1000's of additional URLs to the crawl report and being indexed by Google. They don't see it as a priority but I believe these could be very harmful to our site. examples from URL string:
Web Design | | julianne.amann
uruguay-argentina-chilenullnull/days
rainforests-volcanoes-wildlifenullnull/reviews
of-eastern-europenullnullnullnull/hotels0 -
Check list for Manual penalty – Before going for reconsideration
Hi there, Any one please help us, in cross checking our recovery work before submitting to reconsideration request. Quality Check list for a Website SEO audit check list Why am requesting means, our previous request was came with a negative result. Thanking you in advance
Web Design | | Shashidhar.SEO1 -
Does Google penalize duplicate website design?
Hello, We are very close to launching five new websites, all in the same business sector. Because we would like to keep our brand intact, we are looking to use the same design on all five websites. My question is, will Google penalize the sites if they have the same design? Thank you! Best regards,
Web Design | | Tiberiu
Tiberiu0 -
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 -
Duplicate content
Please help me to solve a problem with duplicate content errors.
Web Design | | NadiaFL
I received report today that 53 pages (all my pages) are market as duplicate
content. Yes, they are all about Oasis of the Seas but about different aspects
of it. Question is: how I can handle this error in report? Thank you!0 -
Minimising duplicate content
From a minimising duplicate content perspective is it best to create all blog posts with a single tag so google doesn't think the same post being returned via a different tag search is duplicate content. I.e. the urls below return the same blog post; or doesn't it matter. for example http://www.ukholidayplaces.co.uk/blog/?tag=/stay+in+Margate http://www.ukholidayplaces.co.uk/blog/?tag=/Margate+on+a+budget are the same posts... thanks
Web Design | | JonAcourt0 -
Multiple Sites, multiple locations similar / duplicate content
I am working with a business that wants to rank in local searches around the country for the same service. So they have websites such as OURSITE-chicago.com and OURSITE-seattle.com -- All of these sites are selling the same services, but with small variations in each state due to different legal standards in the state. The current strategy is to put up similar "local" websites with all the same content. So the bottom line is that we have a few different sites with the same content. The business wants to go national and is planning a different website for each location. In my opinion the duplicate content is a real problem. Unfortunately the nature of the service makes it so that there aren't many ways to say the same thing on each site 50 times without duplicate content. Rewriting content for each state seems like a daunting task when you have 70+ pages per site. So, from an SEO standpoint we have considered: Using the canonocalization tag on all but the central site... I think this would hurt all of the websites SERPs because none will have unique content. Having a central site with directories OURSITE.com/chicago -- but this creates a problem because we need to link back to the relevant content in the main site and ALSO have the unique "Chicago" content easily accessable to Chicago users while having Seattle users able to access their Seattle data. The best way we thought to do this was using a frame with a universal menu and a unique state based menu... Also not a good option because of frames will also hurt SEO. Rewrite all the same content 50 times. You can see why none of these are desirable options. But I know that plenty of websites have "state maps" on their main site. Is there a way to accomplish this in a way that doesn't make our copywriter want to kill us?
Web Design | | SysAdmin190 -
Meta Title and Description for click through optimization
I have a few years experience optimizing PPC text for click-through and conversion rates. I don't see many web sites that are using these methods for their organic listings generated from meta tags. Why is this? So many meta tags seem to be either keyword stuffed or auto generated. From my research, it seems that keywords in meta tags mean little to search engine optimization other than the fact that vertically aligning keywords from search phrase to listing to landing page is important. (Just like it is in PPC). Now that I am personally doing more than just PPC, I have begun rewriting meta text for increased conversions. The search results look to me like My web site is the only one doing this. Is everyone missing out on something, or am I missing something?
Web Design | | EugeneF0