Duplicate Content Caused By Blog Filters

[Marketpath]

We are getting some duplicate content warnings based on our blog.  Canonical URL's can work for some of the pages, but most of the duplicate content is caused by blog posts appearing on more than 1 URL.  What is the best way to fix this?

[smstv]

Hey TJ;

I found that http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ Is the BEST by far plug in that will fix you Canonical URL issues. i know it sure fixed all mine.

[Marketpath]

Thanks for the quick response.  Unfortunately, we aren't using Wordpress for our blog, so installing that plug-in isn't really an option.  Any idea how the plug-in actually accomplishes the feat of taking care of the tags, categories, and date filters to make them have the correct canonical link?

[RyanKent]

Which CMS are you using?

The preferred choice would be to only offer your blog articles using a single URL. This may be possible naturally through your CMS.

Otherwise you need to 301 redirect all alternate versions of the URL to the primary version.

Most CMS' will offer a means to achieve this effect, often via an extension. I use Joomla as my preferred CMS and AceSEF and SH404SEF are two extensions which offer this functionality and are highly rated.

[Marketpath]

Ryan,

Thanks for the reply.

We are using Marketpath CMS and doesn't support plug-ins like that.

Maybe I am confused on how you're able to set 301's on list-tags though?  Since each tag or category's content is generated based upon the most recent entries that apply to that specific filter, you can't set a 301 to one specific place.  So how does your plug-in accomplish that?

[RyanKent]

Your CMS will have a database. All links to your articles will be contained within the database.

The concept would be an additional field would be created in the database to separate out the actual URL from the public URL. The actual URL would be redirected to the public URL.

[Marketpath]

Thanks, Ryan!  I'll take this to our development team.  Have a good weekend.