Duplication, pagination and the canonical
-
Hi all, and thank you in advance for your assistance.
We have an issue of paginated pages being seen as duplicates by pro.moz crawlers.
The paginated pages do have duplicated by content, but are not duplicates of each other. Rather they pull through a summary of the product descriptions from other landing pages on the site.
I was planing to use rel=canonical to deal with them, however I am concerned as the paginated pages are not identical to each other, but do feature their own set of duplicate content!
We have a similar issue with pages that are not paginated but feature tabs that alter the URL parameters like so:
?st=BlueWidgets
?st=RedSocks
?st=Offers
These are being seen as duplicates of the main URL, and again all feature duplicate content pulled from elsewhere in the site, but are not duplicates of each other. Would a canonical tag be suitable here?
Many Thanks
-
The rel next prev is not for duplicated content - it just shows google how the parts relate to the whole.
An alternative to the rel next prev is the "Classic Pagination for SEO" that uses noindex another article by Adam
http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284
If you have a duplicate issue, this would solve it as you would noindex all the duplicate pages.
What you need to do (and I can't do this for you), is to look at all the crawl paths that you are providing Google. As I mention above, you are not doing any favors to Google or to your site when you show Google an infinite number of paths to get to the same content. It just wastes Google's time and you don't want to do that when Google also has to crawl the rest of the internet. If you solve this issue, you will solve your duplicate issue.
AJ Kohn just posted an article on the concept of crawl budget that talks about this. I think the article is quite good and it explains why we need to look at all the topics of noindex, nofollow, robots, canonical and rel next prev http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization
-
Thanks CleverPhD,
That's a very interesting read by Adam Audette too, thanks.
I should say that there's no internal search, each tab has a series of duplicated 'blurbs' taken from the product's unique landing page, while the body copy remains the same across the slight variations in the URL. So with:
example.com/example/?st=BlueWidgets
example.com/example/?st=RedSocks
all of these will feature the same body copy, while the last two will have a series of small descriptions from other landing pages in the site. Would the canonical tag be appropriate in this case? We only need to index 'example.com/example'.
Also, does the rel next prev take into account duplicate content? We want only the main URL indexed as all the paginated pages feature duplicate content, there is no view all page however.
Many thanks
-
If I am understanding the question - I think pulling in some body copy from each search result (and not just the whole page) would be fine. I think Google will see that this is a search result and that you are pointing to other pages. You are probably going to pull in text from the title too. This is common practice in search results - heck Google does it!
If you are still concerned about the pulled in descriptions, your option is to setup the system to have an alternate description for each page. Use the alternate description when you pull it into your main page. It is more work, but it will eliminate this issue.
Separately, paginated pages no longer need to be canonicaled to the index page. You can use rel next and prev.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en
It explains to Google the relationship between P1 and P2,3,4,5,n etc.
Beyond that, you need to watch that you do not get into too many paginated pages to get to the exact same product pages. Lets say you had 1,000 widgets that were blue, red and green and also were Free, Expensive or Cheap. You would have several sets of paginated pages (one set for Blue, one for Red, Green, Free, Cheap, Expensive, one for Red and Expensive) etc. It gets to be a little crazy as they all lead to the same set of widget product pages. You need to manage how to have Google crawl all that and not have your Paginated Category pages look like duplicated. Adam Audette writes great stuff on this. Look here for things to consider
http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/site-search-dynamic-content-and-seo/01032013/
-
Thank you Robert, and for the helpful link.
You did read my question correctly, however I failed to ask it ask entirely correctly. Just to complicate matters, I neglected to mention that there is body copy on each page, which technically will be duplicated.
It sits above the tabs and does not change, while the tabbed pages - under new URL parameters - pull in a sentence or two of product description from elsewhere (a unique landing page).
So,
?st=BlueWidgets
?st=RedSocks
?st=Offers
will all feature the same body copy and different duplicate content. For obvious reasons, we only want the SE to index the main URL.
Any ideas?
Thanks again
-
Hi
It doesn't sound like rel=canonical is the solution, as each one of your pages might feature multiple pieces of content from various other parts of your website (if I've read your question correctly) - so which would be the canonical version of the page?
You could use Parameter Handling in Webmaster Tools to ensure Google knows what to do with your various parameters. Moz doesn't matter here, as long as Search Engines are aware of how to handle your pages correctly.
There's a good overview here.
I hope that's helpful
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
-
Duplicate title while setting canonical tag.
Hi Moz Fan, My websites - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/ has run financial service, So our main keywords is about "Insurance" in Thai, But today I have an issues regarding to carnonical tag. We have a link that containing by https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance?showForm=1&brand_id=9&model_id=18&car_submodel_id=30&ci_source_id=rabbit.co.th&car_year=2014 and setting canonical to this url - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance within 5,000 items. But in this case I have an warning by site audit tools as Duplicate Page Title (Canonical), So is that possible to drop our ranking. What should we do, setting No-Index, No-Follow for all URL that begin with ? or keep them like that.
Technical SEO | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND0 -
Canonical tags
How hard is it to put in Canonical tags on a webpage? My web guy didn't do it because he put in redirects in place for all old URLs and all content
Technical SEO | | Boodreaux
(except error pages and advanced searches) should have a unique URL. By not having canonical tags does it lose link juice? Not sure if that question makes sense. 🙂 Poo1 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
Hi All, I am getting warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Does it really affect my site?. I am using wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
404 and Duplicate Content.
I just submitted my first campaign. And it's coming up with a LOT of errors. Many of them I feel are out of my control as we use a CMS for RV dealerships. But I have a couple of questions. I got a 404 error and SEO Moz tells me the link, but won't tell me where that link originated from, so I don't know where to go to fix it. I also got a lot of duplicate content, and it seems a lot of them are coming from "tags" on my blog. Is that something I should be concerned about? I will have a lot more question probably as I'm new to using this tool Thanks for the responses! -Brandon here is my site: floridaoutdoorsrv.com I welcome any advice or input!
Technical SEO | | floridaoutdoorsrv0 -
Duplicate content
I have two page, where the second makes a duplicate content from the first Example:www.mysite.com/mypagewww.mysite.com/mysecondpageIf i insert still making duplicate content?Best regards,Wendel
Technical SEO | | peopleinteractive0 -
Duplicate title tag error
Hi all, I am new to SEO, and we have just launched a new version of our site (kept the domain name the same though). I keep getting errors for duplicate title tags - e.g. www.sandafayre.com/default.aspx and www.sandafayre.com/Default.aspx, www.sandafayre.com/StampAuctions.aspx and www.sandafayre.com/stampauctions.aspx (plus loads others :o). The only difference each time seems to be the capitalisation of the first character - but I though URLs were not case sensitive? I've been advised to add the rel canonical tag to one of the pages, but the problem is I really only have 1 version of each page! Can anybody help please? Many thanks in advance! Nikki
Technical SEO | | Stampy780 -
Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?
Hi SEOmozers Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me! Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market. They don't want to set up a simple redirect because a) the .com is UK-hosted b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site? Any help much appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Duplicate Pages Issue
I noticed a problem and I was wondering if anyone knows how to fix it. I was a sitemap for 1oxygen.com, a site that has around 50 pages. The sitemap generator come back with over a 2000 pages. Here is two of the results: http://www.1oxygen.com/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/services/rentals.htm
Technical SEO | | chuck-layton
http://www.1oxygen.com/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/1oxygen/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators/oxusportableconcentrator.htm These are actaully pages somehow. In my FTP there in the first /portableconentrators/ folder there is about 12 html documents and no other folders. It looks like it is creating a page for every possible folder combination. I have no idea why you those pages above actually work, help please???0