How to solve Parameter Issue causing Duplicate Content

[himanshu301989]

Hi everyone,

My site home page comes up in SERP with following url www.sitename/?referer=indiagrid

My question is:-

Should I disallow using robots.txt.?

or 301 redirect to the home page

Other issue is

i have few dynamic generated URL's for a form

http://www.www.sitename/career-form.php?position=SEO Executive

I am using parameter "position" in URL Parameter in GWT.

But still my pages are indexed that is leading to duplicate page content.

Please help me out.

[TomRayner]

Hi Himanshu

I would not use a 301 redirect or block with the robots.txt file as the dynamic query parameter (basically everything after the "?") may not work if you do that. Your CMS may depend on it, or you may be tracking certain things with the query in analytics (for instance, a client I've worked with uses queries to measure display ad performance). For this reason, I wouldn't redirect.

However, implementing a canonical tag on each page should stop Google indexing any dynamic URLs that are created, which will stop any duplicate content issue. For each page on your site, eg: www.sitename.com, www.sitename.com/page1.html, www.sitename.com/page2.html etc. - have a self-referring canonical tag on each one - basically, include a canonical tag that points to the page you are on. For each example above, that would be:

Get in touch with your dev team or whoever created the website to see if they can implement the tags site-wide.  If you're running Wordpress, the Yoast SEO Plugin is a free tool that will do this for you.

Finally, take a look at the SEOMoz guide to canonicals - it's really helpful and will help to explain my points further.

Hope this helps!

[SEOAndy]

I agree, canonical urls are the way to go with this - unless of course you can draw them into unique urls without variables which may also solve the issue - though not entirely

[himanshu301989]

Thanks Tom.

One more question,

Will Google drop the duplicate pages from its index after applying canonical tag.?

[TomRayner]

It will. It may take a bit of time for it do so, but they should drop relatively quickly. Google is very good at following the canonical directive.

[himanshu301989]

Thanks Tom.

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