Duplicate Titles for Large Lists
-
Our blog (www.cowleyweb.com/blog) has recently been given topic categories so we can utilize our old blogs. Otherwise, users would only see what's new and never look back (our blogs are organized by the month they were published) and all that hard work would kind of be a waste after a while.
So we came up with a few topics (i.e. social media, internet marketing, etc.) and adding those as tags to blogs. Now, users can click the topics and get a results page on our blog of all the previously published blogs related to that topic. Sounds great.
BUT, it's hurting our SEO crawl report. If the list goes beyond one page of search results, the 2nd and subsequent pages get dinged as "duplicate title" b/c they share the same title (i.e. "Social Media"). How can I fix this?
I'm not the web designer but something tells me maybe some sort of tag that says "Page 2" or something would do the trick. We use Drupal which is good for customization.
I assume tons of bloggers and websites have dealt with this problem.
Please help. Want to give the web guy some solutions.
Thank you.
-
I have never used it but try implementing the Smart Paging module + Tokens - http://drupal.org/project/smart_paging
-
I would suggest going to Analytics, segmenting by organic search traffic, and seeing if anyone has landed on those pages from search results in the last 2-3 months. If Google is not returning them in search results, and they are not bringing traffic, Google usually favors cleaning pages out of the index that don't need to be there.
If you don't want to noindex them, you can add "Page 2" etc to the title tags to eliminate the duplicate title errors in the crawl report.
-Dan
-
Talked to our web designer. He said he's nervous about no-indexing as if Google will get suspicious and it will hurt more than be a solution. Don't know what to say.
-
Hey There
Sounds like you are all set - just want to add that the type of page you're referring to: page/2 etc is "subpages" and you'll also want to look into noindexing those as well, in addition to "tags" and "categories". That should also fix the errors you're seeing in the Moz report.
-Dan
-
Thanks guys! That's awesome. Forwarding to our developer.
-
It's usually suggested that Tag archives and Category archives be set to NoIndex which will help in alleviating this issue.
-
This sounds like a Drupal/CMS issue. if Drupal doesn't have a fix natively, i'm sure a 3rd developer may have a solution:
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
-
I'm doing a crawl analysis for a website and finding all these duplicate URLs with "null" being added to them and have no clue what could be causing this.
Does anyone know what could be causing this? Our dev team thinks it's caused by mobile pages they created a while ago but it is adding 1000's of additional URLs to the crawl report and being indexed by Google. They don't see it as a priority but I believe these could be very harmful to our site. examples from URL string:
Web Design | | julianne.amann
uruguay-argentina-chilenullnull/days
rainforests-volcanoes-wildlifenullnull/reviews
of-eastern-europenullnullnullnull/hotels0 -
A question about title tag when the page has 2 services.
Hi all, Assuming a company has two services: SEO and PPC. Here is the situation: I would like to focus on SEO for now but also don't want to leave my PPC service out of the page. SEO accounts for 60% of the content, while PPC accounts for 40%. Assuming the content (SEO + PPC) of the page will not change, which title tag would you prefer, and why? SEO | brand name (Is it appropriate that the title focus on SEO but the content of the page contains PPC) SEO | PPC | brand name (Will the keywords dilute each other?) SEO | SEM Agency | brand name (The idea behind it is that SEM includes SEO and PPC so I think Google would be OK with the page ranking for SEO and also including PPC in the content. I really appreciate your help and explanation. Thank you!
Web Design | | Raymondlee0 -
How to avoid duplicate title tags?
I've got roughly 1200 location pages for a travel client. Since the business does the same thing at every location, the title tags and descriptions are almost identical except for the location name. I know Google likes tags and meta descriptions to be unique, but how many different ways can I write the same title in a 55 character limit? For example, here's how the titles look: Things to do in San Jose, CA | Company Name
Web Design | | Masbro
Things to do in Dallas, TX | Company Name
Things to do in Albuquerque, NM | Company Name **My question: Are 1200 title tags structured this way unique enough for Google? ** I have got the same problem with the meta descriptions, but I can vary those a bit more because i have more characters to work with. Thanks for your input,
Dino2 -
Above the Fold Content - Use of large images
Hi All, Our designers have come to the SEO team to ask if have a large image across the top of the page taking up a large majority of the above the fold real estate will impact our SEO. Our initial thoughts are no as long as we have an optimised H1 visibal to the user landing there which informs them what the page is about. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Web Design | | J_Sinclair1 -
Which Content Causes Duplicate Content Errors
My Duplicate Content list starts off with this URL: http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/bellevue-medical-center-logo Then it lists the five below as Duplicate Content: http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/fonts http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/clear-zone http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/social-media http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/order-stationery http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/logo I do notice that most of these pages have images and/or little or no content outside of our sites template. Is this causing SEOmoz to see it as duplicate? Should I use noindex, follows to fix this? This error is happening with branding pages so noindex is an option. What should I do if that's not an option? Should I change our mega menus to be ajax driven to so the links aren't showing up in the code of every page?
Web Design | | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine0 -
Homepage Title Question? Multi-Keywords or All Encompassing Keyword
Okay so I am currently redesigning my company's webpage. I am making it responsive and giving it a more up to date look with newer features, etc. A facelift, basically. While updating the site i'm also doing some on-page optimization here and there, and am curious about the page title for my homepage. My company offers video production, web development & design, and web marketing. While we do offer each service individually, we are really trying to sell the combination of all three services to our clients and show them how they can work together effectively. Now my question is, in my homepage title, should i list each service offering keyword (which is what i do now) like this : "Video Production - Web Design - Web Marketing • Company Name" Or, should i try to find one keyword that kind of sums up what we do, like this: "Magic All-Encompassing Keyword • Company Name" I'm thinking that since three sort of unrelated keywords are in the page title, it may be viewed as over-optimizing and we won't see as good of results as just focusing on one keyword, which leads me to think that i should try to sum all of our services into one "all-encompassing" keyword such as "media production", which isn't the best choice, i'm just throwing it out there for the sake of this discussion. Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Duplicate Content Problem on Our Site?
Hi, Having read the SEOMOZ guide and already worried about this previously, I have decided to look further into this. Our site is 4-5 years old, poorly built by a rouge firm so we have to stick with what we have for now. Were I think we might be getting punished is duplicate content across various pages. We have a Brands page, link at top of page. Here we are meant to enter each brand we stock and a little write up on that brands. What we then put in these write ups is used on each brands item page when we click a brand name on the left nav bar. Or when we click a Product Type (eg. Footwear) then click on a brand filter on the left. So this in theory is duplicate content. The SEO title and Meta Description for each brand is then used on the Brands Page and also on each page with the Brands Product on. As we have entered this brand info, you will notice that the page www.designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/armani-jeans/ has the same brand description in the scroll box at the top as the page www.designerboutique-online.com/shirts/armani-jeans/ and all the other product type pages. The same SEO title and same Meta descriptions. Only the products change from each one. This then applies to each brand we have (at least 15) across about 8 pages. All with different URLs but the same text. Not sure how a 301 or rel: canonical would work for this, as each URL needs to point at specific pages (eg. shirts, shorts etc...). Some brands such as Creative Recreation and Cruyff only sell footwear, so technically I think??? We could 301 to the Footwear/ URL rather than having both all-clothing and footwear file paths? This surely must be down to the bad design? Could we be losing valulable rank and juice because of this issue? And how would I go about fixing it? I want a new site, but funds are tight. But if this issue is so big that only a new site would fix it, then maybe the money would need to come forward. What do people make of this? Cheers Will
Web Design | | YNWA0 -
Duplicate content.
Hi there....we're dealing with a duplicate content mess. We're a franchisor(www.kitchensolvers.com), and each of our franchises have their own landing page. The trouble is, the way the landing pages are set up, it's causing all the links available on the national level of the website to be re-indexed each time for every franchise! We don't have an in-house developer and was wondering if anyone else has had similar issues and point me in the right direction.
Web Design | | tafkat0