Duplicate Page content | What to do?
-
Hello Guys,
I have some duplicate pages detected by MOZ. Most of the URL´s are from a registracion process for users, so the URL´s are all like this:
www.exemple.com/user/login?destination=node/125%23comment-form
What should I do? Add this to robot txt? If so how? Whats the command to add in Google Webmaster?
Thanks in advance!
Pedro Pereira
-
Hi Carly,
It needs to be done to each of the pages. In most cases, this is just a minor change to a single page template. Someone might tell you that you can add an entry to robots.txt to solve the problem, but that won't remove them from the index.
Looking at the links you provided, I'm not convinced you should deindex them all - as these are member profile pages which might have some value in terms of driving organic traffic and having unique content on them. That said I'm not party to how your site works, so this is just an observation.
Hope that helps,
George
-
Hi George,
I am having a similar issue with my site, and was looking for a quick clarification.
We have several "member" pages that have been created as a part of registration (thousands) and they are appearing as duplicate content. When you say add noindex and and a canonical, is this something that needs to be done to every individual page or is there something that can be done that would apply to the thousands of pages at once?
Here are a couple of examples of what the pages look like:
http://loyalty360.org/me/members/8003
http://loyalty360.org/me/members/4641
Thank you!
-
1. If you add just noindex, Google will crawl the page, drop it from the index but it will also crawl the links on that page and potentially index them too. It basically passes equity to links on the page.
2. If you add nofollow, noindex, Google will crawl the page, drop it from the index but it will not crawl the links on that page. So no equity will be passed to them. As already established, Google may still put these links in the index, but it will display the standard "blocked" message for the page description.
If the links are internal, there's no harm in them being followed unless you're opening up the crawl to expose tons of duplicate content that isn't canonicalised.
noindex is often used with nofollow, but sometimes this is simply due to a misunderstanding of what impact they each have.
George
-
Hello,
Thanks for your response. I have learn more which is great
My question is should I add a noindex only to that page or a noidex, nofolow?
Thanks!
-
Yes it's the worst possible scenario that they basically get trapped in SERPs. Google won't then crawl them until you allow the crawling, then set noindex (to remove from SERPS) and then add nofollow,noindex back on to keep them out of SERPs and to stop Google following any links on them.
Configuring URL parameters again is just a directive regarding the crawl and doesn't affect indexing status to the best of my knowledge.
In my experience, noindex is bulletproof but nofollow / robots.txt is very often misunderstood and can lead to a lot of problems as a result. Some SEOs think they can be clever in crafting the flow of PageRank through a site. The unsurprising reality is that Google just does what it wants.
George
-
Hi George,
Thanks for this, It's very interesting... the urls do appear in search results but their descriptions are blocked(!)
Did you try configuring URL parameters in WMT as a solution?
-
Hi Rafal,
The key part of that statement is "we might still find and index information about disallowed URLs...". If you read the next sentence it says: "As a result, the URL address and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the site can still appear in Google search results".
If you look at moz.com/robots.txt you'll see an entry for:
Disallow: /pages/search_results*
But if you search this on Google:
site:moz.com/pages/search_results
You'll find there are 20 results in the index.
I used to agree with you, until I found out the hard way that if Google finds a link, regardless of whether it's in robots.txt or not it can put it in the index and it will remain there until you remove the nofollow restriction and noindex it, or remove it from the index using webmaster tools.
George
-
George,
I went to check with Google to make sure I am correct and I am!
"While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by
robots.txt
, we might still find and index information about disallowed URLs from other places on the web." Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=enYes, he can fix these problems on page but disallowing it in robots will work fine too!
-
Just adding this to robots.txt will not stop the pages being indexed:
Disallow: /*login?
It just means Google won't crawl the links on that page.
I would do one of the following:
1. Add noindex to the page. PR will still be passed to the page but they will no longer appear in SERPs.
2. Add a canonical on the page to: "www.exemple.com/user/login"
You're never going to try and get these pages to rank, so although it's worth fixing I wouldn't lose too much sleep on the impact of having duplicate content on registration pages (unless there are hundreds of them!).
Regards,
George
-
In GWT: Crawl=> URL Parameters => Configure URL Parameters => Add Parameter
Make sure you know what you are doing as it's easy to mess up and have BIG issues.
-
Add this line to your robots.txt to prevent google from indexing these pages:
Disallow: /*login?
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
-
Duplicating words in the page title OK?
Im finding a site with lots of duplicated words in the title tags, I have always avoided doing this in the past, Is there any penalty for having a word repeated twice in the title, indeed is there a benefit from having it twice, IM assuming not
On-Page Optimization | | Donsimong
For example: Marketing Services in Milton Keynes | Our Services | TFA
https://www.t-f-a.co.uk/services the word service is repeated twice, in my opinion this is of no benefit at all and is better rewritten to remove the duplication1 -
How come canonicalized pages are showing in the Duplicate Titles report?
I am currently removing all duplicate titles from my site via title tag changes, 301's, and in some instances, canonical tags. I'm confused about why the Moz report spit out pages with duplicate titles that are canonicalized to other pages. Does Google actually consider these pages as having duplicate titles? Or is Roger Mozbot not intuitive enough to to disregard those pages?
On-Page Optimization | | StevenLevine0 -
Duplicate content - "Same" profile-information
Hi, I own a casting website with lots of profiles. Some of these profiles only typed in their firstname, email and age, when they registered on the site, and they haven't added more information ever since. From Crawl Diagnostics, I can see that there is "lots" of these profiles, which looks exactly the same (only showing age and firstname), allthought they are not the same. I could add which day the profile were created on the site, to maybe avoid these "duplications". The email will always be hidden. Or, how big an issue is this? Crawl Diagnostics tells me, that there is around 200 of these, and they are "marked" as High Priority. Any ideas on what to do? /Kasper
On-Page Optimization | | KasperGJ0 -
Duplicate Content for Event Pages
Hi Folks, I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them? Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue? I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks. Kind Regards Gareth Daine
On-Page Optimization | | PurpleGriffon0 -
High Volume Duplicate Title and Content Errors: Scale of 1-10 How bad is this?
I have 15k pages and 1.5K have duplicate title and content errors. the reason is I have a ring parent page with child pages for each of the size variations. On a scale of 1-10 how big an issue is this and does it need fixing?
On-Page Optimization | | Tippman0 -
Duplicated Page Content
I have encountered this weird problem about duplicate page content. My site got 3 duplicate content similar on the link structure below. If I'm going to use rel canonical does it help to resolve the duplication problem? Thanks http://www.sample.com http://www.sample.com/ http://www.sample.com/index.php
On-Page Optimization | | mattvectorbpo0 -
Duplicat page content issue I don't know how to solve
I've got a few pages (click here to see the fist on with the others as side bar links). They are all thumbnail pages of different products. The tiles are pretty different but the page content is virtually the same for all of them as is the meta description tag. I'm getting error's on the SEOmoz crawl for those pages. I know the meta tag shouldn't be a problem in SEO but is the content of the page going to cause me issues? Are the error messages from SEOmoz a result of the page content or the meta description? The pages are very similar but they are different enough that I want to separate them onto different pages. There would be too many links on that single page as well if all the thumbs where on the same page. Should I just ignore the error messages?
On-Page Optimization | | JAARON0 -
Percentage of duplicate content allowable
Can you have ANY duplicate content on a page or will the page get penalized by Google? For example if you used a paragraph of Wikipedia content for a definition/description of a medical term, but wrapped it in unique content is that OK or will that land you in the Google / Panda doghouse? If some level of duplicate content is allowable, is there a general rule of thumb ratio unique-to-duplicate content? thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | sportstvjobs0