How can I make it so that the various iterations (pages) do not come up as duplicate content ?

[Tony14Aug]

Hello,

I wondered if somebody could give me some advice.

The problem of various iterations of the clanedar page coming up as duplicate content.

There is a large calendar on my site for events and each time the page is viewed it is seen as duplicate content . How can I make it so that the various iterations (pages) do not come up as duplicate content ? Regards

[Gamer07]

Hi,

When you change the page, check the URL, you will see parameters. Such as calendar?week=18

Open your robots.txt file and add this line

Disallow: /calendar?

[Tony14Aug]

Gamer07

Thanks for this , it is very helpful. I'll try it out.

Just to clarify I need to add this to every calendar page which comes up as being duplicate? If so is there a quick way of doing it as there are (I kid you not) over 5,000 calendar pages which are coming up as duplicate. Obviously I'd prefer not to go through all of those manually.

Going forwards I take it that I add this to every calendar page. Is there there a proactive way of stopping it in the first place or is it just a case of remedying it (with this code) once it occurs . As obviously ideally I'd like to stop it occuring again in the future as opposed to keep remedying it again and again.

Many thanks

[Gamer07]

No, no, no. You don't add these to calendar pages. You need to place a file called robots.txt in your root folder.

Read more here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

[evolvingSEO]

Anthony

There's a few ways to do this, and it does depend a little on the specifics of how the site is set up but the best (and easiest) may be to use the URL parameter settings in Webmaster Tools.

You're going to log into webmaster tools, go to configuration->URL Parameters - set it to NOT index things beyond the ? (this may be numbers 2 and beyond or it may be everything)

How is this set up though? Does the calendar "start" and "end" somewhere or is it going off infinitely in either direction?

The robots.txt file won't keep the page out of the index.

If you can let us know some more specifics that would be great!

-Dan