Canonical tag or 301

[Houses]

Hi,

Our crawl report is showing duplicate content. some of the report I am clear about what to do but on others I am not.

Some of the duplicate content arises with a 'theme=default' on the end of the URL. Is this version of a page necessary for people to see when they visit the site (like a theme=print page is) in which case I think we should use a canonical tag, or is it not necessary in which case we should use a 301?

Thanks

[TomRayner]

Hi there

The process you have there sounds absolutely right.  If the other version of the page exists for a legitimate reason, you should use a canonical tag.  You might also want to add to the head tag of your page, which will prevent Google from indexing the page.

For all other circumstances, a 301 is by in large a good route to go down, as it keeps the URLs  clean and the user journey uninterrupted.  If you have thousands of 301s to consider, you may want to be a bit more stringent in your decision making, as you don't want too many slowing down the .htaccess file.

A timely guide to canonical tags has been released on the Google webmaster page, which you can find here.  Have a read through that, but other than that I say your thinking is spot on.

Hope this helps.

[Houses]

Thanks. Not sure what a "theme=default" version of a page is though. Is it one humans need to see like the print or text only version? I need to know so that I can do the right thing for the page i.e. canonical tag or 301.

Thanks for the meta robots tip - was just looking into that and it would have been my next question....

When you refer to stringent decisions for 301's, what would you do for the pages we may then decide not to 301?

Sorry for all the questions and your help is much appreciated Tom.

[TomRayner]

Not at all, I'm happy to help!

I can only presume that the theme query you're getting is related to the WP/Joomla theme you're using.  Wouldn't be able to help specifically without seeing it, but I would assume that the URL without the "theme=default" at the end should be the canonical URL.

For more stringent decisions - if you have a big amount of URLs and you're thinking of redirecting some, I'd start by looking at your analytics traffic - has any visitor come to your site via that URL within the last 60 days? If yes, I would definitely redirect.  If no, I'd ask this:

Do you have any inbound links to that page? If you put in the root domain into Open Site Explorer and click on top pages and export the results into a CSV - you can see which pages have inbound links.  Those without links can be ignored, those with links should be 301'd (provided you are happy that the links are of a good quality), in order for you to preserve the link equity, or SEO 'strength', of the link.