Duplicate page errors

[cingingifts]

I have 102 duplicate page title errors and 64 duplicate page content errors. They are almost all from the email a friend forms that are on each product of my online store.  I looked and the pages are identical except for the product name. Is this a real problem and if so is there a work around or should I see if I can turn off the email a friend option? Thanks for any information you can give me.

Cingin Gifts

[kristicastaneda]

Do they need to be indexed?  Perhaps you should consider using blocking any spider from crawling them using robots and using a noindex meta tag.

[cingingifts]

Hi Steven, I just got that report from seomoz and those errors were returned from their crawling of the site. I'm new to this SEO stuff so I'm not sure about the indexing thing. I do know a little about the robots.txt file so I'll look into blocking those pages.

Thanks,

Keith

[Aran_Smithson]

Looking at your site I see that your Email a friend script is opening a brand new page and passing through the product ID. To stop the page being indexed you can add the following line to the robots.txt

Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp

afte the line that looks something like

User-Agent: *

Heres some light reading on the robots.txt file

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

BE CAUTIOUS! if you dont know what your doing seek further assistance as you could do some bad things in the robots.txt.

Whilst the solution above will probably solve your duplicate page issue. I think there is room for improvement here.

Email a friend scripts needn't take the user away from the product they are viewing. You could open the email a friend script in a new window, or even better get rid of the Email a friend button altogether and make your social sharing buttons bigger and more prominent. Also, consider giving the users a Call to Action to sharing the product via the social buttons.

Hope this helps.

Aran

[cingingifts]

Hi Aran,

I added that line to my robots.txt file.

User-agent:*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /v/vspfiles/photos/
Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp

Someone else recommended adding the following line to the EmailAFriend.asp file. Do I need this line?

I like the suggestion for removing the email a friend and working more on the social area. I thought turning off the email part was probably the easiest fix for the duplicate pages.

Thanks for the great advice!

Keith

[Aran_Smithson]

The change you made to the robots should be sufficient. You can also add the meta tag in there to be doubly sure, but its not needed

Though, your social buttons has the Email A Friend option built in so you are replicating the same functionality with the Email a Friend button.

No problem, happy to help.

Aran

• if your problem is solved, dont forget the Answered, and Good answer buttons

[Dr-Pete]

Odds are that this isn't causing you major problems yet, but if the variants are indexed by Google (you can check with the "site:" operator), I would use the META robots tag. Robots.txt is good for prevention, but it's not great at clearing pages out of the index, in my experience.

[cingingifts]

Thanks for the good advice everyone. I really appreciate it.

Keith