Using Rel Nofollow on Duplicate Pages

[trialminecraftserverfinder]

Hi there,

I have a rather large site that has duplicate content on many pages due to how it's being spidered by google. I was hoping I could set the internal link to this page as "nofollow."

My question is that I have hundreds of other sites with backlinks to these duplicate content pages.. will this affect me negatively if I tell google not to index the duplicated pages?

[ChadBreezy]

Add this to the top of your pages that you feel have the same content somewhere else on the website.

As far as the backlinks, I am not sure how that will pan-out. In theory they should still flow. I'll have to double check and make sure. However, duplicate content is a big issue. I deal with it on a national level and it is a total nightmare, especially when the site is very large-dynamically produce by a cms that is not seo friendly.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

[ChadBreezy]

I found this page within SEO MOZ that answers the link juice question:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

"Will this pass 100% of the link juice from a given page to another? More or less than a 301 redirect does now? Note that Google's official representative from the web spam team, Matt Cutts, said today that it passes link juice akin to a 301 redirect but also noted (when SEOmoz's ownGillian Muessig asked specifically) that "it loses no more juice than a 301," which suggests that there is some fractional loss when either of these are applied."

[trialminecraftserverfinder]

Cheers - great answer thanks!

[Brian-H]

Yeah...don't no-follow that creates traps for link juice. Use rel-canonical tags as Chad mentions

[AndyMacLean]

Nofollow is no longer a way to block indexing of internal links. External yes, internal no.

Chad's answer about canonicals is a good one. Depending on how/why the duplicate pages are created/required example, sort orders or page 2, page 3, page 4 of the same page, you also have a couple of other options:

• Managing url paramaters in Google Webmaster Tools http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
• Googles rel next and rel prev tags http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html