Long list of companies spread out over several pages - duplicate content?

[AaronGro]

Hi all,

I am currently working with a company formation agent. They have a list of every limited company spread over hundreds of pages. What do you guys think? Is there a need for Canonicals? The website is ranking pretty well but I want to make sure there aren't any problems in the future.

Here are two pages as examples:

http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=MULLAGHBOY+CONSTRUCTION+LIMITED&next=1#

http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=%40a+company+limited&next=1#

Also what about the actual company pages? See an example below

http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?name=AMNA+CONSTRUCTION+LTD&number=06630333#.U8PW6_ldX1s

Thanks in advance

Aaron

[webmethod]

Hi Aaron,

The search experience on the website is a bit unconventional in that you search for a company name and it returns pages of results alphabetically listed with the name you are searching for hopefully in there somewhere!

You could make changes to the pagination using rel=next/previous, but what you're displaying isn't really "true" results pagination. I would therefore be cautious about changing it if the site is ranking well.

Canonicals would only be required if you were showing the same content on different URLs. A quick "site:" search like the below only returns one result, so either Google isn't showing the duplicate URLs (very likely given your question) or it isn't a problem for you:

site:www.formationsdirect.com inurl:companysearchlist.aspx?name=AMNA+CONSTRUCTION+LTD

You can look in webmaster tools to see which query string parameters it is picking up and configure the behaviour you want GoogleBot to take. You can also get some sense of the duplication if it is an issue.

Regarding the company page URL you gave, anything after the # in the URL won't get crawled so you don't need to worry about canonicalising those.

Again, if it's ranking well, be very careful about trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. If you can find duplicate content then definitely redirect or canonicalise it and see what kind of impact it has. I would do this before taking on anything more significant like the website information architecture and navigation.

George

[AaronGro]

Hi George,

Thanks for your clear answer.

The reason I am worried is that MOZ is flagging up thousands of these links as duplicate. Looking at it again today I noticed that it is mainly the list pages that are duplicates. EG

http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=%40a+company+limited&next=1

http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=AAA+AUTOMOTIVE+LTD&back=1

http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=A+LIMITED&next=1

These 3 bring up exactly the same page and it seems that every page in the list has 3 or 4 of these variations.

I did a check in WT and it seems that the 'companysearchlist' parameter has been listed but it is not actually affecting any URLs. Would changing the status to 'pagination' help with this? I imagine that it would be then completely ignored by Google. Or would it better to make a canonical for each duplicate issue so each page gets in once?

PS I left the '#' in the last URL by mistake. It is just a tracking parameter that is being used by the company.

Aaron

[webmethod]

Hi Aaron,

First off, since your rankings haven't been affected I would definitely hold off changing anything in WMT unless you're sure as it might cause more harm than good. If you paginate what looks like potentially thousands of pages I'm not convince Google will look on this fondly. The URLs will probably also change regularly as more companies are incorporated because the pages are set to show fixed list lengths.

Resolving the duplicate content onsite is definitely the best course of action. The fact that Moz is crawling these duplicate pages indicates that it's picking up links from somewhere on your site. If you are able to stop exposing these links and only linking to the "preferred version" i.e. canonical then this will give you some control and a better understanding of the site's information architecture.

Regarding setting up of canonicals, I suspect that this will be a harder job as of the 3 duplicate URLs you provide, it's not immediately clear which one would be the canonical. There are probably also thousands of instances similar to this duplicate group across other company lists and Google will have picked at random which one it sees as the canonical on each one. Marking another URL in the group as the canonical stands to (at least temporarily) cause a drop in rankings and SEO visibility if done across thousands of pages simultaneously.

If I was you and I felt compelled to address the issue I would pick a sample ~10% of the duplicate groups, set a canonical on each of them and see what happens in terms of rankings over 3-6 weeks. I would also add the canonicals to a sitemap and try update any links on your website to make sure only the canonical is referenced.

It's risky though, as your rankings are good even though I understand the principle of what you're trying to achieve. When I've tended to do things like this it's when a website has had nothing to lose.

George

[AaronGro]

Thanks George,

I'll think I'll take your advice and hold off for now.

Aaron