Need help with some duplicate content.

[NoahsDad]

I have some duplicate content issues on my blog I'm trying to fix. I've read lots of different opinions online about the best way to correct it, but they all contradict each other. I was hoping I could ask this community and see what the consensus was.

It looks like my category and page numbers are showing duplicate content. For instance when I run the report I see things like this:

http://noahsdad.com/resources/

http://noahsdad.com/resources/page/2/

http://noahsdad.com/therapy/page/2/

I'm assuming that is just the categories that are being duplicated, since the page numbers only show on the report at the end of a category.

What is the best way to correct this? I don't use tags at all on my blog, using categories instead. I also use the Yoast SEO plug in. I have a check mark in the box that disables tags. However it says, "If you're using categories as your only way of structure on your site, you would probably be better off when you prevent your tags from being indexed."

There is a box that allows you to disable categories also, but the description above makes it seem like I don't want to block both tags and categories.

Any ideas what I should do?

Thanks.

[AlanMosley]

Maybe i am not understading you, but these pages dont apear to be duplicates top me

[NoahsDad]

On my reports they show up as duplicate page titiles....

[AlanMosley]

OK, then yes try to give them unique page titles, even add page 2 on the end, if this is difficault to do then i would not worry too much about it.

[NoahsDad]

I'm not sure how you would give the author pages different titles on a Wordpress powered site...

Should I check some of the no index settings within the plugin?

[AlanMosley]

Thats why i said if it is difficult then i would not worry.

i would not no-index them,

if you had unique titles, you may rank a bit better, you ae not going to get punished for it if they dont. but if you no-index, you are punishing yourself.

not only do no-indexed pages not appear in search results, but any link pointing to them is wasting link juice.

[Alex-Harford]

You look like you're doing a good job, you even have unique text content for each video on the pages, so I can't see why they're flagging as duplicates. Is this in the SEOmoz software? That takes into account the whole structure of the page rather than just the content. Like Alan says, add the page number to the title tag if possible, though I'd add it at the beginning of the tag - it just helps show the search engines that page 1 is the most important.

P.S. this is still a good article a couple of years later: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

[Alex-Harford]

I've never used Wordpress but does this help?
http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/avoid-duplicate-meta-descriptions-in-pages-2-and-higher-of-the-wordpress-loop/

It's strange how it's possible to add canonical page numbers, but not add the same thing to the title tag, I think.

[NoahsDad]

Yes, I have about 60 404's and 403's I'm trying to correct...

Thanks for the feedback by the way.

[gfiorelli1]

The correct answer to your kind of issue, which is related to psgination, is this one: Use the rel="prev" rel="next" tags. These are the tags Google suggest to use in order to specify that a set of pages are paginated, hence it will just consider the first one. Check these links: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html http://www.seomoz.org/q/need-help-with-some-duplicate-content There are several plugins for Wordpress about this solution.

[AlanMosley]

Gianluca is correct. prev next would work here, but i thought this would be too confusing, i did not know there were plugins that can do this for you. also, this would make page one rank for all the content, this may confuse users when they dont find the content the searched for on that page. so technicaly it would work, but foor the user i dont know if it is the right solutions, this works best for one article over many pages.

[Alex-Harford]

I didn't mention "prev" and "next" as they are already implemented in the head tag, would you add them directly to the links as well? Also, I think Google is the only search engine that supports them at the moment.