Lost with conical, nofollow noindex. Not sure how to use it on a dyanmic php site with multiple region select options

[moby123]

I have a site with multiple regions the main page after a region is selected is login.php but the regions are defined by ?rid=11 , 12, etc. These are being picked up as duplicate content but they are all different regions. As i hired external php coders to develop most of the site I am scared to start meddling with any of the raw code and would like some advise on how to not show these as duplicate content. should i use noindex nofollow or connical? if Connical how do i set it up on the main login.php page? p.s. i am an extreme nube to seo

[mememax]

Hi Moby, first of all the difference between all the tags you mention:

• canonical: is a meta tag which indicates which page containing the same content is the original one, It may be used from one page to another to indicate which one is the main one or a as a self canonical indicating the same page where it is located, because you can avoid duplciates due to sessions id or other kind of tags (trackings and the like)
• noindex: is a meta tag which indicates to bots to not include that page to their index. It's used to avoid low quality pages to being shown in serps
• nofollow: is both a meta, used to avoid search engines to crawl all the links in one page, or is used attached to a link to indicate bots to not pass value to that link.

So if you got pages which are identical you want to use the canonical in both the original page (as a self canonical) and in the other oines pointing to the original one. If they're are almost identical. If they're not you may want to:

• noindex those duplicates
• add quality content to the other regions pages so google finds that they're not identical at all.

Maybe your regions pages are seen as identical due to:

• low content, an image and slight changes to the title tag is not enough to mark a page as different, try to add good content, or mash content from other pages.
• is the content accessible when not logged in? If not google is seeing identical pages because its bots cannot crawl the content (bots cannot login)

About the login page you may noindex it, but I don't see any hurry to  make changes to that page.

Hope that helps!

[moby123]

Hi mememax,

Thank you for the simple yet detailed explanation, really helped me out a lot.

I will try the conical and let you know how it goes.

[mememax]

Great! Look forward to see your results