Duplicate Content Issues - Where to start???

[MattByrne]

Dear All

I have recently joined a new company Just Go Holidays - www.justgoholidays.com

I have used the SEO Moz tools (yesterday) to review the site and see that I have lots of duplicate content/pages and also lots of duplicate titles all of which I am looking to deal with.

Lots of the duplicate pages appear to be surrounding, additional parameters that are used on our site to refine and or track various marketing campaigns. I have therefore been into Google Webmaster Tools and defined each of these parameters. I have also built a new XML sitemap and submitted that too.

It looks as is we have two versions of the site, one being at www.justgoholidays.com and the other without the www

It appears that there are no redirects from the latter to the former, do I need to use 301's here or is it ok to use canonicalisation instead?

Any thoughts on an action plan to try to address these issues in the right order and the right way would be very gratefully received as I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. (we also use a CMS system that is not particularly friendly and I think I will have to go directly to the developers to make lots of the required changes which is sure to cost - therefore really don't want to get this wrong)

All the best

Matt

[RobertJakobson]

Hi, according to Google's official documentation canonical URLs are sufficient:

"In the world of content management and online shopping systems, it's common for the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs. With content syndication, it's also easy for content to be distributed to different URLs and domains entirely. For example:... Your server is configured to serve the same content for the www subdomain or the https protocol..."

Proposed Plan of Action:

1. Decide which of non-www or www should be your preferred domain. Set the canonical urls and the preferred domain in GWT accordingly.
2. Divide your site into dozen or so sections and every day for the next 2 weeks correct the duplicate titles and content of each section. At the end, leave a day to go over the work and at the start give yourself a day to get familiar with the work. So you will not be overwhelmed by the details, even if you don't finish everything in a day.
3. See how the work done affects your sitemap and overall SEO when you go forward. If possible, only implement changes to the CMS after this SEO work has been done. Why? Because by then you will be familiar enough with the CMS and with the goals you want to achieve to fruitfully communicate with the developers. I see you are running a CMS based on ASP.net — changing these boutique CMS-s can be quite expensive, as you stated