How to prevent duplicate content at a calendar page

[GeorgFranz]

Hi,

I've a calender page which changes every day.

The main url is
/calendar

For every day, there is another url:

/calendar/2012/09/12
/calendar/2012/09/13
/calendar/2012/09/14

So, if the 13th september arrives, the content of the page 
/calendar/2012/09/13
will be shown at
/calendar

So, it's duplicate content.

What to do in this situation?

a) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 301? (but the redirect changes the day after to  /calendar/2012/09/14)

b) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 302 (but I will loose the link juice of /calendar?)

c) Add a canonical tag at /calendar (which leads to /calendar/2012/09/13) - but I will loose the power of /calendar (?) - and it will change every day...

Any ideas or other suggestions?

Best wishes,

Georg.

[riyas_heych]

Hi Georg What about adding canonical tag(s) from each days (/calendar/2012/09/13) calender pages to the main page (/calendar)

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Muhammed,

because the content is different. This would devaluate all calendar pages.

Best wishes,
Georg.

[ParagonDigital]

Hi Georg,

Setting up a redirect or canonicalization for the the calendar page in the ways you describe might make it harder to build up any kind of authority for your calendar.

You could consider adding canonicalization for all the individual day pages that points to the main calendar page. ie. Each page /calendar/YYYY/MM/DD would have rel canonlical=/calendar/. Not sure this is the best idea though.

I don't know how your calendar is setup but you could also look at differentiating the pages by doing just a listing of events on the main page and including summaries or detail on the current day page. Or maybe including some additional information about your calendar on the main page like what type of events are included and how to submit events and not including that information on the individual day pages.

I've always taken the approach of minimizing duplicate content as much as possible but not getting excessive with it. I think in a case like this you could do more harm than good. The calendar page is an ever changing page, it's not like you have the exact same static content on two pages.

Hope this helps!

Zach

[GrouchyKids]

What about adding to all of the other pages i.e not to /calendar/ the links will be followed but not indexed by Google.

[Dr-Pete]

Sadly, the short answer is that you can't have it all. Either you index the separate calendar pages, get more pages/content out there and risk some "thinning" of your index, or you focus on one page, maximize the SEO value, but then lose the individual pages.

I would not 301 or 302 to the individual calendar URLs - that kind of daily URL shifting is going to look suspicious, Google will not re-cache consistently, and you're going to end up with a long-term mess, I strongly suspect.

I actually tend to agree with Muhammed and Paragon that a viable option would be to let the individual days have their own content, but then canonical to the main calendar page to focus the search results. That way, users can still cycle through each individual day, but Google will focus on the core content. In a way, that's how a blog home-page works - the content changes daily, but you're still keeping the bots focused on one URL.

Think of it in terms of usability, too. How valuable is old/outdated content to search users? They might find something relevant on an old page, but they still probably want to see the main calendar and view recent content.

Where are the links to the individual days, if "/calendar" always has today's content? I'm wondering if there's a hybrid approach, like letting the most recent 30 days all have their own URLs, but then redirecting or using rel-canonical to point to the main page after 30 days.

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Peter,

thanks for your answer!

Well, it's even more complicated!

It's an astrology calendar with planet aspect data for each day starting from 1900-01-01 to 2099-12-31, so there are around 73,000 pages, it's a big database.

People are searching for a date and the planet aspects. So I need the "old pages" and the future pages in the index.

People are also searching their birthday and want to know their zodiac. My calendar is providing this info.

This is an example:
http://www.schicksal.com/horoskop/tageshoroskop/1951/09/10

The best thing is to do nothing at the moment I think. The alternativ is to cut the content of the current day from the main page and let the user click a button which redirects to the current day page. But this is not user friendly and I will do nothing at them moment.

Any other idea would be great

Best wishes,

Georg.

[Dr-Pete]

Ah... yeah, that's tricky. There's no magic solution, I'm afraid. You've really got three options:

(1) Leave it alone

(2) Re-organize your site architecture to push individual date pages down a level or two, so that they get less internal link-juice.

(3) Re-organize such that you focus search engines on chunks of time or maybe date/aspect combinations, but then de-index the individual date combos. This would take a much better understanding of your site structure than I currently have. The goal would be to focus your index on some smaller combination of pages that still covers 80% of your search traffic.

The big problem is just that this is a lot potential dilution, and I suspect that many of these pages look very similar to Google. I'm also certain that not all pages have the same value, either for SEO or users, so there's some hybrid approach where you could prune back but not lose everything. Long-term, I think that's worth the time and trouble to sort out, but it's not an emergency or something I'd rush into.