Tags on my website cause duplicate content

[andzon]

Hi I just recently started a website and I am new to MOZ pro. What Moz pro detected on my website under high priority is that "duplicate page content"

and what I realize about these duplicate page content is regarding the tags i put on my post. Because it is a wordpress blog, we are allow to add tags on the side before we publish our post. And because of these tags, it linked to the same page but different url.

for example

website.com/tags/whatever

website.com/tags/whatever 2

and both these url direct to the same page

So how do i solve this? do i just stop tagging whenever i write a post? delete all tags while it is not necessary?

i seen method like 301 redirect or rel=canonical but is there anyway to solve this problem so I do not face this issue whenever i make a new post in my blog? I mean it doesnt make sense to redirect 301 to every single tags i have whenever i write a new post right?

thanks guys

[SamuelScott]

Tags are good for the user experience, but they can be a problem for search engines because of the seemingly duplicated content. I would use the robots.txt file or noindex meta tag (the meta tag is the preferred option) to block search engines from accessing and indexing tag-based pages.

When Moz's spider sees this markup, it should note that the issue has been addressed and the detections of "duplicated content" should disappear. Good luck!

[andzon]

Sorry a huge newbie here,

Assuming if i want to use the "block with meta no index"

on

www.website.com/tags

how do i do so? the guide only teaches how to add a disallow on robot.txt but what about meta?

Do i just add  on the tag page?

should i make it  too?

[TomVolpe]

Hi,

Duplicate content is bad for search because it forces pages on your site to compete with each other for rank. If each tag only contains one post then you are duplicating every post twice - once in the original post and once in the tag which is displaying the same post and only that post.

If you use a lot of the same tags for each post, for example you tag every post 'blog' and 'daily’, then those pages will contain the same posts and therefore be duplicate content.

It may be worth checking your analytics to see if any of these pages are getting entrances from organic search, which will tell you if the 'duplicate' is outranking the original post. But often this is because that page contains a lot more information on the subject than a single blog post. So you may not be able to replicate that success with a smaller single blog post.

As the previous answer stated using a robots.txt indicating Disallow: /tags/whatever2 will tell a spider not to crawl that page, you could do it selectively by disallowing only the tags which are being flagged as duplicates, or disallow all tagged pages from being crawled with Disallow: /tags/*

But every site is different and you will need to decide for yourself if your 'duplicate' content is actually harming your site, you might find that those pages are full of keywords naturally and are attracting all your traffic.

Hope that helps!