Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
-
Hello,
We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools.
However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below
Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation?
Thanks,
Stephen.
-
Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time to contribute.
If Google doesn't crawl and index, can you guys explain this?
I have found the solution elsewhere. The canonical tag is auto-generated, so it is creating it's own canonical tag for the pages. So we need to create a rule in the back end that exlcudes parameters after the end of our URL's
-
I completely agree with the above answer, the links with GCLID are generated through Google Adwords and so on they won't be available to Googlebot when crawling the site. Also if it even would happen you could let Google ignore that parameter, but as it's one of Googles own parameters I doubt it would ever get you in trouble.
-
Hi Stephen,
GoogleBot can't crawl links with a gclid, so they won't end up in the index and won't be flagged as duplicate pages.
AdWords does not work this way. The script that produces the ads contains no links--there's nothing for GoogleBot to discover without running the script. which it does not do. I am not certain that Google search produces the ads the same way, but what would be the point of GoogleBot crawling Google SERPs? It doesn't do that.
I do include canonical tag in the header of all our pages, which is one of Google's suggestions for dealing with this. I suppose that could be why I don't have an issue with this.
*If you don't believe this to be true, look through your logs and try to find one record of GoogleBot crawling an AdWords link with a valid gclid.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
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
-
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
SEM Rush & Duplicate content
Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Does content revealed by a 'show more' button get crawled by Google?
I have a div on my website with around 500 words of unique content in, automatically when the page is first visited the div has a fixed height of 100px, showing a couple of hundred words and fading out to white, with a show more button, which when clicked, increases the height to show the full content. My question is, does Google crawl the content in that div when it renders the page? Or disregard it? Its all in the source code. Or worse, do they consider this cloaking or hidden content? It is only there to make the site more useable for customers, so i don't want to get penalised for it. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOhmygod0 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Using the same content on different TLD's
HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape1 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is an RSS feed considered duplicate content?
I have a large client with satellite sites. The large site produces many news articles and they want to put an RSS feed on the satellite sites that will display the articles from the large site. My question is, will the rss feeds on the satellite sites be considered duplicate content? If yes, do you have a suggestion to utilize the data from the large site without being penalized? If no, do you have suggestions on what tags should be used on the satellite pages? EX: wrapped in tags? THANKS for the help. Darlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXeSEO0 -
Concerns about duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years. The url is www.betterbraces.com. We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website. The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products. The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues. However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-2836690