Identified blog issues, anyone able to help?

[AITLtd]

hi everyone,

I have been going through a site recently and i am noticing certain seo errors that are being caused by the blog.

Nothing too harmful, but nonetheless i am hoping to correct them.

1 - The seomoz software have identified that i have duplicate title tags on the following

http://www.altman.co.uk/blog

http://www.altman.co.uk/blog?page=1

http://www.altman.co.uk/blog?page=2

ETC, ETC, ETC...

Now am i right that i need to canonicalize those types of urls with the rel="next" and rel="previous"?

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[Gustav-Northclick]

Yes you are correct.

You need to have a summary title on them that indicates that this is page 1 or 2 and so on.

It's a good idea to use rel="next" and rel="previous" .

See more info from google about this:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Best, G

[mediabase]

Hi Ryan, As your website increases in popularity and size it can become extremely challenging to keep track of all textual content, let alone identifying duplicate content. You may already know that having duplicate content can hinder the search rankings of a website, and there are good reasons for this. For example, the traffic for a particular keyword may be divided over multiple pages. But, what if someone else copies your content? Although webmasters around the world have expressed their concerns on the issue, Google and other search engines are yet to comment on the solution. We have put together our recommendations to avoid issues caused by duplicate content within your website.

Canonicalization’ means keeping one of the different versions of your URL as the main one and adding an HTML element to all non-canonical versions in order to tell the search engines which the correct version (canonical version) of the URL is.

Whenever the search engines discover the same (duplicate) content available from more than one URL, they will attempt to choose a best (or "canonical") version and filter out the duplicates. If a webmaster does not take steps to monitor and correct this issue, it can impair the rankings of the website. Often it's just a minor issue that resolves itself over time, but it can also be a significant and long-lasting drag on your rankings.

Duplicate titles and Descriptions do not cause penalties. They can cause problems in ranking when one of the pages gets ranked and the other one filtered out of that search result. Google may well not choose the page you prefer to rank for that particular query.

If your site has a true penalty, this is not a likely cause.

I hope that your query had been solved.

[Dr-Pete]

I have to disagree on the risk assessment - true duplicates, on a massive scale, can cause something as severe as a penalty. It's not a Capital-P penalty in the traditional sense, but people who were hit by Panda due to massive duplication might as well have an algorithmic penalty. I'm dealing with client cases right now where duplicates caused much, much more than minor issues (80%+ traffic losses over months).

[Dr-Pete]

Pagination is a tough issue, and there's no one right answer (Google can't even agree with itself). If you're not experiencing ranking problems, then rel=prev/next is probably a good solution. It's a "soft" signal, IMO, and will help Google sort things out.

If you begin to have trouble, I tend to use META NOINDEX,FOLLOW on pages 2, 3, etc. In the vast majority of cases, these paginated results have no SEO value and no inbound links, so they add no value to the index. It really depends a lot on the scope of the problem.