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[Dino64]

SEO Moz has found a bunch of duplicate content errors on one of my sites because blog archives has created a new page for each tag.

For example: http://examplesite.com/blog/tag/travel

http://examplesite.com/blog/tag/travel-photography

http://examplesite.com/blog/tag/tours

http://examplesite.com/blog/tag/accommodations

The above urls are just tags for the same exact page, hence making them all duplicates. Is it normal for each tag to be a separate page? Do the search engines see this as duplicate content? If so, how do I correct this issue if I want to keep the tags? Regards,Dino

[donford]

Hi Dino here are your questions and my answers

The above urls are just tags for the same exact page, hence making them all duplicates. Is it normal for each tag to be a separate page? This is powered by your CMS content mangment system, Wordpress and Joomla have ways to fix this issue. Check with your CMS forums to see if this is way to modify this behavior, or use canonical tags to prevent the duplicate content from being indexed.

Do the search engines see this as duplicate content? Yes
If so, how do I correct this issue if I want to keep the tags? Canonical tags or change the way the tags are generated and or content is archived.

Hope that helps

[Dino64]

Right on, Donford! Thanks for the quick response. Regards, Dino

[donford]

You're very welcome

[Dino64]

Hey Donford:

I tried to uncheck the tags box in my Sitemap Plugin for Wordpress so the tags wouildn't be included in the Sitemap. In the latest crawl report, however, it is still showing all those tag pages as duplicate pages.

In the Edit Tag pages in Wordpress there are two boxes that allow me to "no index" the tag and another one to "exclude from Sitemap." Do think I am safe if I do both? I am "no indexing" all tags and am also eliminating them from the sitemap. Do you think I may be doing any harm to SEO?

Thanks, Dino.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

What you need to do is;

• Using your SEO plugin (hopefully Yoast SEO plugin) - noindex tag archives.
• Also, noindex subpages of archives

It is normal for tags to be their own page, but it is not desirable to let the search engines index them, thus why we'll add the noindex for tag pages. The search engines can potentially see them as duplicate or thin content. It's OK they exist, just not ok to index them.

Some resources;

My article on Moz about setting up WordPress correctly

Yoast SEO plugin

-Dan

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

See my other answer. You first have to noindex tag archives. Then you can exclude them from the XML sitemap.

Noindexing tags will not harm SEO. Google has been not returning tag pages in search results very much at all anymore. You really want your articles themselves to rank.

-Dan

[evolvingSEO]

Thanks for chiming in! Just want to clarify, canonical tags would be the last resort. In this case, especially for WordPress, noindexing tag archves and noindexing subpages is the way to go first.

-Dan

[Dino64]

OK, thanks Dan, and you're right, I should have gone back and read your first response again because in the end, that is exactly what I ended up doing. I no-indexed each tag with the SEO Yoast Plugin options.

I'm expecting that the next time SEO Moz crawls my sight that it won't count these as duplicates anymore. Am I correct in believing that?

Regards,

Dino

[Dino64]

Ok, I'm at a complete loss now. I've now enabled the sitemap for the yeast SEO plugin and have checked the box in the plugin settings to not allow tags or categories in the sitemap. I've also went into each tag and plugin page and have selected to noindex and to not include in sitemap tags and plugins. Did this for each one, yet I just ran another crawl report and still getting duplicate pages from SEOMoz. Any suggestions why Seomoz is still finding those pages? What else can I do? Regards, Dino