How critical is Duplicate content warnings?

[Gamer07]

Hi,

So I have created my first campaign here and I have to say the tools, user interface and the on-page optimization, everything is useful and I am happy with SEOMOZ.

However, the crawl report returned thousands of errors and most of them are duplicate content warnings.

As we use Drupal as our CMS, the duplicate content is caused by Drupal's pagination problems. Let's say there is a page called "/top5list" , the crawler decided /top5list?page=1" to be duplicate of "/top5list". There is no real solution for pagination problems in Drupal (as far as I know).

I don't have any warnings in Google's webmaster tools regarding this and my sitemap I submitted to Google doesn't include those problematic deep pages. (that are detected as duplicate content by SEOMOZ crawler)

So my question is, should I be worried about the thousands of error messages in crawler diagnostics?

any ideas appreciated

[SWA_Adam]

OK, this is just what I've done, and it might not work for everyone.

As far as I can tell, the duplicate content warnings do not hurt my rankings, I don't think. When I first signed up for SEOMoz they really alarmed me. If they are hurting my rankings, it's not much - as we preform well in many competitive keywords for our industry, and our website traffic has been growing ~20% year over year for many years now.

The fix for auto-generated duplicate content on our site (which I inherited as my responsibility when I started at my company) would be very expensive. It's something I plan on doing eventually along with some other overhauls, but right now it's not in the budget, because it would basically involve re-architecting how the site and databases function on the back end (ugh).

So, in order to help mitigate any issues and help keep Google from indexing all the duplicate content that can be generated by our system, I use the "URL Parameters" setting in Google Webmaster Tools (under Site Configuration). I've set up a few parameters for Google to specifically NOT INDEX, to keep the duplicate content out of the search engine. I've also set some parameters to specifically reenforce content I want indexed (along with including the original content in sitemaps I've curated myself, rather than having auto-generated sitemaps potentially polluted with duplicate content).

My thinking is that while Roger the SEOMoz bot is still finding this stuff and generating warnings, Googlebot is not.

I don't work at an agency - I'm in-house and I've hard to learn everything by trial and error and often fly by the seat of my pants with this sort of thing. So my conclusion/solutions may be wrong or not work for you, but it seems to work for me.

It's a band-aid fix at best, but it seems to be better than nothing!

Hope this helps,

-Adam

[Vahe.Arabian]

For pagination problem's it would be better to use this cannonical method- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html .

Having dup content in the form paginated results will not penalise you, rather the page/link equity will be split between all these pages. This means you would need to spend more time and energy on the original page to outrank your competitors.

To see these errors in Google Webmaster Tools you should go to the HTML sections area where it will review the sites meta data. I'm sure ull find the same issues there, instead of the sitemaps.

So to improve the overall health of your website,  I would suggest that you do try and verify this issue.

Hope this helps. Any issues, best to contact me directly.

Regards,

Vahe

[Gamer07]

Thanks Adam and Vahe. Your suggestions are definitely helpful.

[Dr-Pete]

One clarification one Vahe's answer - if these continue (?page=2, ?page=3, etc.) then it's traditional pagination. You could use the GWT solution Adam mentioned, although, honestly, I find it's hit-or-miss. It is simpler than other solution. The "ideal" Google solution is very hard to implement (and I actually have issues with it). The other option is to META NOINDEX the variants, but that would take adjusting the template code dynamically.

If it's just an issue of a bunch of "page=1" duplicates, and this isn't "true" pagination, then canonical tags are probably your best bet. There may be a Drupal plug-in or fix - unfortunately, I don't have much Drupal experience.

The question is whether these pages are being indexed by Google, and how many of them there are. At large scale, these kinds of near-duplicates can dilute your index, harm rankings, and even contribute to Panda issues. At smaller scale, though, they might have no impact at all. So, it's not always clear cut, and you have to work the risk/cost calculation.

You can run a command in Google like:

site:example.com inurl:page=

...and try to get a sense of how much of this content is being indexed.

The GWT approach won't hurt, and it's fine to try. I just find that Google doesn't honor it consistently.

[Gamer07]

Thanks for that command Dr. Meyers. Apparently, only 5 such pages are indexed. I suppose I shouldn't worry about this then?

[Dr-Pete]

Personally, I'd keep an eye on it. These things do have a way of expanding over time, so you may want to be proactive. At the moment, though, you probably don't have to lose sleep over it.