Multible Dublicate Titles & Descriptions

[Patff]

Hi,

I reviewed a site for a client recently and noticed when I produced a crawl report (SEOmoz) that there were thousands of pages with the same content. This is because the developer added a ticket booking system which has a page for each day up to 2017 (5 years).

I see in my campaign monitoring that this results in 9,445 duplicate content errors.

The site is only 3 months old and has a Google PR of 4 and is ranking reasonable well for main keywords.

Just wondering if there is a way to fix this or should I leave it. Is it eventually going to result in problems?.

I cant see these pages when I view the server with FTP - perhaps they are dynamically created.

Pat

[asifpolani]

Hi,

Use Colonical tag

[Patff]

Thanks for your help.

Will try that solution.

Pat

[KeriMorgret]

That may not be the proper use of the canonical tag. You generally don't want to do a rel canonical on everything to your home page. I've asked Dr. Pete to step in and add some advice, as he's the expert in that tag.

[Dr-Pete]

I looked at your campaign, and you've essentially got two options here:

(1) You could add a unique element to the title tag, like the availability date.

(2) You could canonicalize or de-index the variations.

Keri's warning is correct about the home-page, but it looks like this is a stand-alone page and rel-canonical would be viable. That would clean up your index gradually, but it would also remove the individual availability pages from the search index (and ranking contention), so it does depend a bit on your strategy.

For the site 9K pages, is quite a bit. The other thing you could do is change the system to only create links for dates with available events. I notice you have a lot of blank dates. Linking those serves no purpose, either for users or Google (and is just creating worthless pages, essentially). If you did that, a lot of these would clean up over time.

You might also consider just blocking the calendar links at some point - in other words, go back 3-6 months, but then don't bother. Don't make Google crawl 5 years worth of past dates.