I have a ton of "duplicated content", "duplicated titles" in my website, solutions?

[Salocharly]

hi and thanks in advance, I have a Jomsocial site with 1000 users

it is highly customized and as a result of the customization we did some of the pages have 5 or more different types of URLS pointing to the same page.

Google has indexed 16.000 links already and the cowling report show a lot of duplicated content.

this links are important for some of the functionality and are dynamically created and will continue growing, my developers offered my to create rules in robots file so  a big part of this links don't get indexed but Google webmaster tools post says the following:

"Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools."

here is an example of the links:

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| http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/salocharly/profile http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/preferences/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/privacy/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-details/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/change-profile-picture/salocharly |

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so the question is, is this really that bad?? what are my options? it is really a good solution to set rules in robots so big chunks of the site don't get indexed? is there any other way i can resolve this?

Thanks again!

Salo

[MRCSearch]

Yes, it really is that bad.

And you answered your own question with regards to fixing it: rel canonical. That is your best bet, and really not that hard to implement (not sure on Joomsocial, though). Google pretty much explains to you the downfalls of using the other options.

Other solutions would be Joomsocial-specific, and I have no experience with that platform. Perhaps someone else who does have it can chime in on that.

[Theo-NL]

Duplicate content caused by having the same content on different URLs is still a big problem of Joomla. What I would recommend is to try to implement canonical tags on your site. This would allow all pages to be crawled and indexed, but the 'SEO metrics' would all be attributed to one single URL. Though that wouldn't strictly solve the duplicate content problem (which for example 301 redirects could, but I'm not sure that would apply in your situation), it would solve most of the SEO related fallout caused by all the duplicate content.

[AlanMosley]

Usethe canonical,

Dont use robots,

when you block pages, link juice flows to those pages and is lost. you can use a meta tag no-index,follow, that way at least the links are still followed and return the link jucie.

But use the canonical that is what its for.

But the best thing, is not to have them, CMS sites often lead to a mess.