Duplicate Page content | What to do?

[Kalitenko2014]

Hello Guys,

I have some duplicate pages detected by MOZ. Most of the URL´s are from a registracion process for users, so the URL´s are all like this:

www.exemple.com/user/login?destination=node/125%23comment-form

What should I do? Add this to robot txt? If so how? Whats the command to add in Google Webmaster?

Thanks in advance!

Pedro Pereira

[RafalJ]

Add this line to your robots.txt to prevent google from indexing these pages:

Disallow: /*login?

[KevinBudzynski]

In GWT: Crawl=> URL Parameters => Configure URL Parameters => Add Parameter

Make sure you know what you are doing as it's easy to mess up and have BIG issues.

[webmethod]

Just adding this to robots.txt will not stop the pages being indexed:

Disallow: /*login?

It just means Google won't crawl the links on that page.

I would do one of the following:

1. Add noindex to the page. PR will still be passed to the page but they will no longer appear in SERPs.

2. Add a canonical on the page to: "www.exemple.com/user/login"

You're never going to try and get these pages to rank, so although it's worth fixing I wouldn't lose too much sleep on the impact of having duplicate content on registration pages (unless there are hundreds of them!).

Regards,

George

[RafalJ]

George,

I went to check with Google to make sure I am correct and I am!

"While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by robots.txt, we might still find and index information about disallowed URLs from other places on the web." Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en

Yes, he can fix these problems on page but disallowing it in robots will work fine too!

[webmethod]

Hi Rafal,

The key part of that statement is "we might still find and index information about disallowed URLs...". If you read the next sentence it says: "As a result, the URL address and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the site can still appear in Google search results".

If you look at moz.com/robots.txt you'll see an entry for:

Disallow: /pages/search_results*

But if you search this on Google:

site:moz.com/pages/search_results

You'll find there are 20 results in the index.

I used to agree with you, until I found out the hard way that if Google finds a link, regardless of whether it's in robots.txt or not it can put it in the index and it will remain there until you remove the nofollow restriction and noindex it, or remove it from the index using webmaster tools.

George

[RafalJ]

Hi George,

Thanks for this, It's very interesting... the urls do appear in search results but their descriptions are blocked(!)

Did you try configuring URL parameters in WMT as a solution?

[webmethod]

Yes it's the worst possible scenario that they basically get trapped in SERPs. Google won't then crawl them until you allow the crawling, then set noindex (to remove from SERPS) and then add nofollow,noindex back on to keep them out of SERPs and to stop Google following any links on them.

Configuring URL parameters again is just a directive regarding the crawl and doesn't affect indexing status to the best of my knowledge.

In my experience, noindex is bulletproof but nofollow / robots.txt is very often misunderstood and can lead to a lot of problems as a result. Some SEOs think they can be clever in crafting the flow of PageRank through a site. The unsurprising reality is that Google just does what it wants.

George

[Kalitenko2014]

Hello,

Thanks for your response. I have learn more which is great

My question is should I add a noindex only to that page or a noidex, nofolow?

Thanks!

[webmethod]

1. If you add just noindex, Google will crawl the page, drop it from the index but it will also crawl the links on that page and potentially index them too. It basically passes equity to links on the page.

2. If you add nofollow, noindex, Google will crawl the page, drop it from the index but it will not crawl the links on that page. So no equity will be passed to them. As already established, Google may still put these links in the index, but it will display the standard "blocked" message for the page description.

If the links are internal, there's no harm in them being followed unless you're opening up the crawl to expose tons of duplicate content that isn't canonicalised.

noindex is often used with nofollow, but sometimes this is simply due to a misunderstanding of what impact they each have.

George

[carlystemmer]

Hi George,

I am having a similar issue with my site, and was looking for a quick clarification.

We have several "member" pages that have been created as a part of registration (thousands) and they are appearing as duplicate content. When you say add noindex and and a canonical, is this something that needs to be done to every individual page or is there something that can be done that would apply to the thousands of pages at once?

Here are a couple of examples of what the pages look like:

http://loyalty360.org/me/members/8003

http://loyalty360.org/me/members/4641

Thank you!

[webmethod]

Hi Carly,

It needs to be done to each of the pages. In most cases, this is just a minor change to a single page template. Someone might tell you that you can add an entry to robots.txt to solve the problem, but that won't remove them from the index.

Looking at the links you provided, I'm not convinced you should deindex them all - as these are member profile pages which might have some value in terms of driving organic traffic and having unique content on them. That said I'm not party to how your site works, so this is just an observation.

Hope that helps,

George