Duplication, pagination and the canonical
-
Hi all, and thank you in advance for your assistance.
We have an issue of paginated pages being seen as duplicates by pro.moz crawlers.
The paginated pages do have duplicated by content, but are not duplicates of each other. Rather they pull through a summary of the product descriptions from other landing pages on the site.
I was planing to use rel=canonical to deal with them, however I am concerned as the paginated pages are not identical to each other, but do feature their own set of duplicate content!
We have a similar issue with pages that are not paginated but feature tabs that alter the URL parameters like so:
?st=BlueWidgets
?st=RedSocks
?st=Offers
These are being seen as duplicates of the main URL, and again all feature duplicate content pulled from elsewhere in the site, but are not duplicates of each other. Would a canonical tag be suitable here?
Many Thanks
-
The rel next prev is not for duplicated content - it just shows google how the parts relate to the whole.
An alternative to the rel next prev is the "Classic Pagination for SEO" that uses noindex another article by Adam
http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284
If you have a duplicate issue, this would solve it as you would noindex all the duplicate pages.
What you need to do (and I can't do this for you), is to look at all the crawl paths that you are providing Google. As I mention above, you are not doing any favors to Google or to your site when you show Google an infinite number of paths to get to the same content. It just wastes Google's time and you don't want to do that when Google also has to crawl the rest of the internet. If you solve this issue, you will solve your duplicate issue.
AJ Kohn just posted an article on the concept of crawl budget that talks about this. I think the article is quite good and it explains why we need to look at all the topics of noindex, nofollow, robots, canonical and rel next prev http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization
-
Thanks CleverPhD,
That's a very interesting read by Adam Audette too, thanks.
I should say that there's no internal search, each tab has a series of duplicated 'blurbs' taken from the product's unique landing page, while the body copy remains the same across the slight variations in the URL. So with:
example.com/example/?st=BlueWidgets
example.com/example/?st=RedSocks
all of these will feature the same body copy, while the last two will have a series of small descriptions from other landing pages in the site. Would the canonical tag be appropriate in this case? We only need to index 'example.com/example'.
Also, does the rel next prev take into account duplicate content? We want only the main URL indexed as all the paginated pages feature duplicate content, there is no view all page however.
Many thanks
-
If I am understanding the question - I think pulling in some body copy from each search result (and not just the whole page) would be fine. I think Google will see that this is a search result and that you are pointing to other pages. You are probably going to pull in text from the title too. This is common practice in search results - heck Google does it!
If you are still concerned about the pulled in descriptions, your option is to setup the system to have an alternate description for each page. Use the alternate description when you pull it into your main page. It is more work, but it will eliminate this issue.
Separately, paginated pages no longer need to be canonicaled to the index page. You can use rel next and prev.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en
It explains to Google the relationship between P1 and P2,3,4,5,n etc.
Beyond that, you need to watch that you do not get into too many paginated pages to get to the exact same product pages. Lets say you had 1,000 widgets that were blue, red and green and also were Free, Expensive or Cheap. You would have several sets of paginated pages (one set for Blue, one for Red, Green, Free, Cheap, Expensive, one for Red and Expensive) etc. It gets to be a little crazy as they all lead to the same set of widget product pages. You need to manage how to have Google crawl all that and not have your Paginated Category pages look like duplicated. Adam Audette writes great stuff on this. Look here for things to consider
http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/site-search-dynamic-content-and-seo/01032013/
-
Thank you Robert, and for the helpful link.
You did read my question correctly, however I failed to ask it ask entirely correctly. Just to complicate matters, I neglected to mention that there is body copy on each page, which technically will be duplicated.
It sits above the tabs and does not change, while the tabbed pages - under new URL parameters - pull in a sentence or two of product description from elsewhere (a unique landing page).
So,
?st=BlueWidgets
?st=RedSocks
?st=Offers
will all feature the same body copy and different duplicate content. For obvious reasons, we only want the SE to index the main URL.
Any ideas?
Thanks again
-
Hi
It doesn't sound like rel=canonical is the solution, as each one of your pages might feature multiple pieces of content from various other parts of your website (if I've read your question correctly) - so which would be the canonical version of the page?
You could use Parameter Handling in Webmaster Tools to ensure Google knows what to do with your various parameters. Moz doesn't matter here, as long as Search Engines are aware of how to handle your pages correctly.
There's a good overview here.
I hope that's helpful
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
-
Hreflang and canonical
Hi all, I'm hoping someone can help me solve this once and for all! I keep getting hreflang errors on our site crawls and I cannot understand why. Does anything here look off to you? Thank you! JGdWcqu
Technical SEO | | eGInnovations1 -
Quick Fix to "Duplicate page without canonical tag"?
When we pull up Google Search Console, in the Index Coverage section, under the category of Excluded, there is a sub-category called ‘Duplicate page without canonical tag’. The majority of the 665 pages in that section are from a test environment. If we were to include in the robots.txt file, a wildcard to cover every URL that started with the particular root URL ("www.domain.com/host/"), could we eliminate the majority of these errors? That solution is not one of the 5 or 6 recommended solutions that the Google Search Console Help section text suggests. It seems like a simple effective solution. Are we missing something?
Technical SEO | | CREW-MARKETING1 -
Rel=canonical Weebly
My problem is with my website as it says I have duplicate page titles and contents because of a /index.html. It says the duplicate content is due to the fact that my homepage on my website is www.seacandytackle.com but it is also www.seacandytackle.com/index.html because I use weebly. How can I use the tag to fix this? It won't let me do a 301 redirect because it is a home page. How can I fix this? What code would I have to use and which url? Also it says that I have duplicate page content between http://www.seacandytackle.com/index.html and http://www.seacandytackle.comhttp://www.seacandytackle.com but I don't recall having any page that looks like http://www.seacandytackle.com http://www.seacandytackle.com from weebly. How can I fix this issue as well? Thank you for any help. Step by step implementation would be particularly helpful in using the rel= tags to fix these duplicate issues.
Technical SEO | | SeaCandyTackle0 -
Duplicate content question...
I have a high duplicate content issue on my website. However, I'm not sure how to handle or fix this issue. I have 2 different URLs landing to the same page content. http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/vegan/ and http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/raw-food/ .In this situation, I cannot redirect one URL to the other since in the future I will probably be adding additional posts to either the "vegan" tag or the "raw food tag". What is the solution in this case? Thank you
Technical SEO | | myfitstation0 -
Are all duplicate pages bad?
I just got my first Crawl Report for my forum and it said I have almost 9,000 duplicate pages. When I looked at a sample of them though I saw that many of them were "reply" links. By this I mean the "reply" button was clicked for a topic yet since the crawler was not a member, it just brought them to the login/register screen. Since all the topics would bring you to the same login page I'm assuming it counted all these "reply" links as duplicates. Should I just ignore these or is there some way to fix it? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Xee0 -
Rel=Canonical being ignored?
Hi all, We have a toys website that has several categories. It's setup such that each product has a primary category amongst the categories within it can be found. For example... Addendum's primary url is http://www.brightminds.co.uk/childrens-toys/board-games/addendum.htm but it can also be found here http://www.brightminds.co.uk/learning-toys/maths-learning/addendum.htm. Hence, in the for that url it has a rel=canonical that points to the first url. For some reason though seomoz ignores this and reports duplicate page content. It doesn't seem to record the canonical tag either. Any ideas what's going on? Thanks, Josh.
Technical SEO | | joshgeake_gmail.com0 -
At what point is the canonical tag crawled
Do search engines (specifically Google) crawl the url in the canonical tag as it loads or do they load the whole page before crawling it? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | ao.com0 -
Did I implement the Canonical Correctly?
Hello, I am trying for the first time to implement a canonical redirect on a page and would really appreciate it if someone could tell me if this was done correctly. I am trying to do a canonical redirect: -from http://www.diamondtours.com/default.aspx -to http://www.diamondtours.com/ As you will see in the source code of the default.aspx page, the line of code written is: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.diamondtours.com" /> Is this correct? Any guidance is greatly appreciated. Jeffrey Ferraro
Technical SEO | | JeffFerraro0