I have a duplicate content on my Moz crawler, but google hasn't indexed those pages: do I still need to get rid of the tags?

[Perenich]

I received an urgent error from the Moz crawler that I have duplicate content on my site due to the tags I have. For example:

http://www.1forjustice.com/graves-amendment/

The real article found here: http://www.1forjustice.com/car-accident-rental-car/

I didn't think this was a big deal, because when I looked at my GWT these pages weren't indexed (picture attached).

Question: should I bother fixing this from an SEO perspective? If Google isn't indexing the pages, then am I losing link juice?

6c2kxiZ

[digitalcrc]

I'm not sure if I understand the question, but the reason the Graves Amendment page isn't being indexed isn't due to duplicate content, it's because of the meta noindex tag on there:

Removing that from the page should get it indexed. If the pages have very similar copy, with slight nuances, I would use a canonical tag to consolidate all of the equity into the 'primary' page to help avoid any duplicate content issues. Hope that helps!

[Perenich]

Excellent response. So would I go through and add the canonical tag to all tag pages?

This duplicate content won't hurt my site because those pages aren't indexed right?

[digitalcrc]

You should be relatively safe from duplicate content issues at the moment, however you're leaving some 'link juice' on the table since whatever equity is in the noindexed page is remaining with it.

If you want to consolidate the pages from a search engine point of view, but still have them both accessible on your site, then you should remove the noindex from the page and add a canonical tag on the less-important page (pointing to the other page). The more important page won't need any additional tags.

The page with the canonical tag won't be accessible from search engines if you do this, so another route is to develop the content on each page a bit more so that they're more dissimilar; you wouldn't need any tags in this case.

[Perenich]

Excellent! Thank you, so do I have to go through and add a canonical tags to all of the tagged pages? Sounds like it will take a while, but it also sounds like I don't have many choices.

[digitalcrc]

It will fully depend on the purpose of each page. In the example case you mentioned, that will be the best solution, but canonical tags =/= noindex tags. I would only suggest using canonical tags if there's a large amount of similar content between pages.

For noindex, I generally don't use them unless I specifically don't want a certain page to be indexed (highly-targeted PPC landing pages are a good example) - you usually don't want to deindex pages without a reason/goal.

If there's lots of duplicate content issues on your site, here are two possible options for cleaning them up, from most ideal to least:

1. Identify duplicate pages and revise the content itself so that it's sufficiently unique. Remove all noindex and canonical tags unless they were already in place for another reason.
2. Use canonical tags to consolidate two or more pages. This will essentially act as a 301 redirect while still allowing users to view the canonicalized pages if they come across them. Your 'best' page of the group shouldn't have any canonical tag on it. This approach should only be used for duplicate content-related issues, not as a substitute for proper redirects if that's what the situation calls for.

Either way, I would remove the noindex tags from your pages unless they were specifically put there for a reason. If you've noticed a bunch, make sure there isn't a toggle or checkbox in you CMS' admin panel that is adding it by default to new pages.

Good luck!