Tags on my website cause duplicate content
-
Hi I just recently started a website and I am new to MOZ pro. What Moz pro detected on my website under high priority is that "duplicate page content"
and what I realize about these duplicate page content is regarding the tags i put on my post. Because it is a wordpress blog, we are allow to add tags on the side before we publish our post. And because of these tags, it linked to the same page but different url.
for example
and both these url direct to the same page
So how do i solve this? do i just stop tagging whenever i write a post? delete all tags while it is not necessary?
i seen method like 301 redirect or rel=canonical but is there anyway to solve this problem so I do not face this issue whenever i make a new post in my blog? I mean it doesnt make sense to redirect 301 to every single tags i have whenever i write a new post right?
thanks guys
-
Hi,
Duplicate content is bad for search because it forces pages on your site to compete with each other for rank. If each tag only contains one post then you are duplicating every post twice - once in the original post and once in the tag which is displaying the same post and only that post.
If you use a lot of the same tags for each post, for example you tag every post 'blog' and 'daily’, then those pages will contain the same posts and therefore be duplicate content.
It may be worth checking your analytics to see if any of these pages are getting entrances from organic search, which will tell you if the 'duplicate' is outranking the original post. But often this is because that page contains a lot more information on the subject than a single blog post. So you may not be able to replicate that success with a smaller single blog post.
As the previous answer stated using a robots.txt indicating Disallow: /tags/whatever2 will tell a spider not to crawl that page, you could do it selectively by disallowing only the tags which are being flagged as duplicates, or disallow all tagged pages from being crawled with Disallow: /tags/*
But every site is different and you will need to decide for yourself if your 'duplicate' content is actually harming your site, you might find that those pages are full of keywords naturally and are attracting all your traffic.
Hope that helps!
-
Sorry a huge newbie here,
Assuming if i want to use the "block with meta no index"
on
how do i do so? the guide only teaches how to add a disallow on robot.txt but what about meta?
Do i just add on the tag page?
should i make it too?
-
Tags are good for the user experience, but they can be a problem for search engines because of the seemingly duplicated content. I would use the robots.txt file or noindex meta tag (the meta tag is the preferred option) to block search engines from accessing and indexing tag-based pages.
When Moz's spider sees this markup, it should note that the issue has been addressed and the detections of "duplicated content" should disappear. Good luck!
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
-
Potential spam websites with high DA linking back to us
Hey everybody, I'm going through all my sites and disavowing crap links. However, I'm having trouble distinguishing which high DA sites to disavow. What would you do? For example:
Moz Pro | | MEllsworth
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=busca.starmedia.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score and https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=cc879fe.activerain.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score They both have tons of backlinks - both good and crap. The first has a DA of 72 and a Moz spam score of 4/17 and the second has a DA of 86 and a Moz spam score of 9/171 -
How can I deal with tag page duplicate issues
The Moz crawler reported some dupliated issues. Many of them have to do with tags.
Moz Pro | | IamKovacs
Each tag has a link, and as some articles are under several tags, these come up as duplicate content. I read Dr Peter's piece on Canonical stuff, but it's not clear to me if any of these are the solution. Perhaps the solution lies somewhere else? Maybe I need to block the robots from these urls (But that seems counter-SEO-productive) Thanks
Kovacs0 -
Update in Moz spider/tools?? Flagging duplicate content / ignoring canonical
Hi all, Has there been an update in the SEOmoz crawling software? We now have thousands of dupe content/page title warnings for paginated product page URLs that have correctly formatted canonicals. e.g. http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx ... has following pages with identical content that have been flagged: http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=6 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 ..plus 4 more URL's. But they all have canonical set. There's even a notice at the bottom of report that tells us there's a canonical set to http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx What gives, SEOmoz ?? Thanks Michael
Moz Pro | | LawrenceNeal0 -
Member Only Content
I run a wordpress based website that contains a large amount of free content, but also a large amount of content that is only accessed via a paid membership. After running a SEOmoz campaign for the site, it showed 3600 errors for duplicate page titles and 1900 errors for duplicate page content. After looking into the errors it became clear that the majority of them were due to the fact that if you clicked on a link to paid content, it would take you to the paid membership sign in page. So how to I go about fixing these errors? I don't want this to hurt my rankings. Or fix it if it already has.
Moz Pro | | CobraJones950 -
Does linking to relevant high authority websites effect your MozTrust or Rank?
Basically what the title says. I am having a hard time understanding why a compeitor with less linking domains and none of any real quality, they're all membership sites or partnerships, nothing to relevant to the industry. While we have links and articles on us from multiple magazines in our industry. As well as to relevant directories with high domain ranks. The only thing I noticed is they're linking to their clients website, which are all high authority websites. So do external links count towards your MozTrust or Rank?
Moz Pro | | SeanConroy1 -
Why does SEO moz show so many more duplicate page titles than webmaster
My SEO moz duplicate page titles are more than double the webmaster duplicate page titles. Plus, some of the items appearing in SEO moz are not really duplicates. Anyone else seeing this?
Moz Pro | | Stamats0 -
"Issue: Duplicate Page Content " in Crawl Diagnostics - but sample pages are not related to page indicated with duplicate content
In the crawl diagnostics for my campaign, the duplicate content warnings have been increasing, but when I look at the sample pages that SEOMoz says have duplicate content, they are completely different pages from the page identified. They have different Titles, Meta Descriptions and HTML content and often are different types of pages, i.e. product page appearing as having duplicate content vs. a category page. Anyone know what could be causing this?
Moz Pro | | EBCeller0 -
Should I worry about duplicate content errors caused by backslashes?
Frequently we get red-flagged for duplicate content in the MozPro Crawl Diagnostics for URLs with and without a backslash at the end. For example: www.example.com/ gets flagged as being a duplicate of www.example.com I assume that we could rel=canonical this, if needed, but our assumption has been that Google is clever enough to discount this as a genuine crawl error. Can anyone confirm or deny that? Thanks.
Moz Pro | | MackenzieFogelson0