Duplicate content via dynamic URLs where difference is only parameter order?
-
I have a question about the order of parameters in an URL versus duplicate content issues. The URLs would be identical if the parameter order was the same.
E.g.
www.example.com/page.php?color=red&size=large&gender=male versus
www.example.com/page.php?gender=male&size=large&color=redHow smart is Google at consolidating these, and do these consolidated pages incur any penalty (is their combined “weight” equal to their individual selves)?
Does Google really see these two pages as DISTINCT, or does it recognize that they are the same because they have the exact same parameters?
Is this worth fixing in or does it have a trivial impact?
If we have to fix it and can't change our CMS, should we set a preferred, canonical order for these URLs or 301 redirect from one version to the other?
Thanks a million!
-
To be fair to Highland, I do think canonical is a good bet here, but I just have to comment that I don't think Google handles these kinds of URLs very well. They should, in theory, but in my experience they rarely do. The problem with order variants is that you can easily spin 100s or 1000s of them and create serious indexation and ranking problems.
For this particular example, the canonical tag is probably best, but there may be cases where certain parameters have no particular value (like a "sort by" parameter). Those are sometimes better off blocked.
I cover a bunch of examples in my mega-post on duplicate content:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
-
Agreed with Highland, this seems exactly the kind of problem canonical can fix. I wouldn't go down the road of 301ing because for parameters that simple you like aren't going to run into problems. The rule of thumb is you should act if you have more than two parameters in the URL (not sure where I read that), but I've seen Google 'figure out' up to 4 for some of my sites.
Another thing to check out is Google webmaster tools, you can set certain keywords and url parameters there to help Google 'learn' how to crawl your site. This Google blog posting might help too:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
-
Google should recognize the difference but, just to be safe, I would add a canonical to your page so you don't have anything to worry about.
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
-
Can I remove certain parameters from the canonical URL?
For example, https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives?page=2&resultsPerPage=16 is the paginated URL of the category https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives/. Can I remove the &resultsPerPage= variation from the canonical without it causing an issue? Even though the actual page URL has that parameter? I was thinking of using this: instead of: What is the best practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | laurengdicenso0 -
URL Parameters, Forms & SEO
Hi I have some pages on the site which have a quote form, in my site crawl I see these showing as duplicate content - my webmaster says this isn't the case, but I'm not sure. Landing page - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs Page with form - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs?quote-form - this also somehow has a canonical on it pointing to https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs?quote-form Which neither of us have added. I'm thinking we need to get the canonical needs to be updated to https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs Is it worth doing this for all these pages or am I worrying about nothing? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate content across domains?
Does anyone have suggestions for managing duplicate product/solution website content across domains? (specifically parent/child company domains) Is it advisable to do this? Will it hurt either domain? Any best practices when going down this path?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pilgrimquality0 -
Mixing static.htm urls and dynamic urls on a Windows IIS Server?
Hi all, We've had a website originally built using static html with .htm extensions ranking well in Google hence we want to keep those pages/urls. We are on a dedicated sever (Windows IIS). However our developer has custom made a new DYNAMIC section for the site which shows new added products dynamically and allows them to be booked online via shopping cart. We are having problems displaying them both on the same domain even if we put the dynamic section withing its own subfolder and keep the static htms in the root. Is it possible to have both function on IIS (even if they may have to function a little separately)? Does anyone have previous experience of this kind of issue or a way of making both work? What setup do we need to do on the dedicated server.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
K3 duplicate page content and title tags
I'm running a Joomla site, have just installed k2 as our blogging platform. Our Crawl Report with SEOMOZ shows a good bit of duplicate content and duplicate title tags with our K2 blog. We've installed sh404SEF. Will I need to go into sh404SEF each time we generate a blog entry to point the titles to one URL? If there is something simpler please advise. Thank you, Don
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldmoore0 -
Duplicate content clarity required
Hi, I have access to a masive resource of journals that we have been given the all clear to use the abstract on our site and link back to the journal. These will be really useful links for our visitors. E.g. http://www.springerlink.com/content/59210832213382K2 Simply, if we copy the abstract and then link back to the journal source will this be treated as duplicate content and damage the site or is the link to the source enough for search engines to realise that we aren't trying anything untoward. Would it help if we added an introduction so in effect we are sort of following the curating content model? We are thinking of linking back internally to a relevant page using a keyword too. Will this approach give any benefit to our site at all or will the content be ignored due to it being duplicate and thus render the internal links useless? Thanks Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayderby0 -
News sites & Duplicate content
Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
Chris Captivate0 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1