Database driven content producing false duplicate content errors

[nickcargill]

How do I stop the Moz crawler from creating false duplicate content errors.   I have yet to submit my website to google crawler because I am waiting to fix all my site optimization issues.

Example:   contactus.aspx?propid=200,  contactus.aspx?propid=201....    these are the same pages but with some old url parameters stuck on them.   How do I get Moz and Google not to consider these duplicates.  I have looked at http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content with respect to

Rel="canonical"

and I think I am just confused.

Nick

[zenstorageunits]

You have a few options you could do. One thing I would look into is maybe doing some url rewriting to change

contactus.aspx?propid=200

to

contactus/propid/200

look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx on how to do that for IIS.

A better option I think if you need to keep the parameters the way they are is to use the rel canocial tag look at moz article

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

but basicly you would need to add something like this to your contact.aspx page(replace example.com with your website url)

This suggest to the website crawler, like google or moz crawler, that those pages should be assoicated with the contact.aspx page.

[LesleyPaone]

I agree zenstorageunits about using rel=canonical but one thing I would like to point out is that Moz does not create false errors. It is a simple crawler, not like google. Google will actually try to follow links that people have used before and that show up in your analytics files. moz uses no logic like that, it just jumps from page to page. If it is picking up a page with a query string like that then it is a link on your site. I would find the links and take them off.

[MikeTek]

Hi Nick,

I think you've gotten some good tips here - I'd agree with Prestashop that the preferred solution would be to find where these parameters are being included in links to this page and remove them.

Failing that, zenstorageunits's advice to use rel="canonical" would be my recommendation - or a 301 redirect from the URLs that include parameters back to the core URL would work.

I wouldn't convert these parameters to subdirectories unless they are integral to the way your site works and pull up unique content - you called them "old parameters" so it sounds like they're not supposed to be there, so probably not a case where you'd want to convert these parameters to subdirectories.

Failing the above, you could utilize the Google Webmaster Tools "URL Parameters" interface to tell Googlebot to ignore these parameters.

Overall, your best course of action is to find and remove the links that include the parameters.

I'd also add that the Moz crawl report is highly sensitive to "duplicate content," and I often find it flags up issues has high/medium priority that are not actually going to have a significant impact on the site. You have to take the crawl report with a grain of salt - while duplicate content can be a serious issue for some sites (ecommerce retailers for example with duplication issues across a wide catalog of products), in most cases it has minimal impact and isn't something I'd hold up your site launch for.

Best of Luck,
Mike

[nickcargill]

All of you guys rock!  I have never been involved in a community that has had the right answers every time... I used the   on all my static pages such as directions, policies, contact, etc... and it removed all the parameters thereby eliminating them from standing out in the MOZ crawl.. I feel like and idiot not knowing about this HTML tag and its importance.   My moz crawl now looks so so much better.

When I mean old url parameters, I just meant a few seconds old,  meaning the user is on property.aspx?property=1  then when they moved to a static page such as contact, directions, policy we now have another page called contact.aspx?property=1 which if I have 150 properties times 10 static pages I basically just created 150 duplicate content errors just for the contact page alone.   Because contact.aspx?property=1 or contact.aspx?property=150 and in between are all the same page... I am sure this has killed my SEO.   SO THAT PROBLEM IS NOW FIXED!!

NOW to revisit what zenstorageunits says about URL rewriting which has many different ways to do it using .net,  but Miketek I would not have to create subdirectories because it is done in the code... they are more like virtual directories...

zenstorageunits or anyone else for that matter, Is it worth it for me to hire somebody to create a URL rewrite app that can change the following;

http:/www.destinationbigbear.com/property_detail.aspx?propid=202 to

http://www.destinationbigbear.com/big-bear-cabin-rentals/a-true-cabin/details

and

http:/www.destinationbigbear.com/property_photos.aspx?propid=202 to

http://www.destinationbigbear.com/big-bear-cabin-rentals/a-true-cabin/photos

See everyone of my 150 cabins has these pages;   info, photos, calendar, video, reviews, rates...and they all have unique cabin names... so it is basically 150 cabins x 6 pages = 900 unique pages with unique content but really only 6 pages dynamically being changed by 150 cabins.

I have been able to dynamically change all the page titles for everyone of these 900 database driven pages such as

Big-Bear-Cabin | A True Cabin Photos   or Big-Bear-Cabin | A True Cabin Calendar and so on.