Auto generated pages

[DWill]

Hi,

I have two sites showing (crawl report from SEOMoz.org) extremely high numbers of duplicate titles and descriptions (e.g., 33,000).   These sites have CMSs behind them and so the duplicate titles, etc., are a result of auto-generated pages.   What is the best way to address these problems?

Thanks!

David

[dawnieando]

Hi David,

We also have large sites with automatically generated titles etc which vary according to category / subcategory etc.   Naturally, it's very difficult to manually configure tens of thousands of page titles manually on a large site.  We therefore programmed the site so that the page titles pulled in their most relevant bits automatically but also built editable fields in our backend so that we could manually configure them for further uniqueness / granularity over time.  We had a default page title pattern there in case that field was empty.  As we've gone through these pages we have seen a good lift across many many terms.

Hope this helps.

[GeorgeAndrews]

Hi David,

Can you provide the CMS you are using? Some CMS's allow you to no-index content that is duplicated because of tags and categories (e.g. WordPress with use of a plugin).

[DWill]

Hi George,

I use wordpress for one - and will look for a plugin.  Thanks!

We use an XML CMS called Pubman for the other.   For improved search and delivery,  we  use Marklogic.    Do you think just writing a robot.txt would work best?

Regards,

David

[GeorgeAndrews]

For the WordPress site I would use Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin. Robots.txt might help, but it would be better to make use of 301 redirects and a plugin for no-indexing in my opinion.