Blog Page URLs Showing Duplicate Content

[_Thriveworks]

On the SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostics, we are receiving information that we have duplicate page content for the URL Blog pages.

For Example:

blog/page/33/

blog/page/34/

blog/page/35/

blog/page/36/

These are older post in our blog. Moz is saying that these are duplicate content. What is the best way to fix the URL structure of the pages?

[Mike.Goracke]

Check out the SEOMoz Help section:

"Duplicate Page Content

Duplicate Content means there are pages that are identical (or nearly identical) to content on other pages of your site, which can force your pages to unnecessarily compete with each other for rankings.

Here are some things you can do about duplicate pages:

Delete content that is similar on each page.

Add some new and unique content to each page that is on the report. This can be done by adding more information, ideas, product descriptions, or anything that can make it differ from other pages on the domain.

You can also add a rel=canonical to one of the duplicate pages. Here are a few ways to do this:

Add a rel="canonical" link in between the  and elements. This should be done on the version of the page you want to be ranking or that non-canonical version of the two (or multiple) pages.

To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool, create a  element that looks like this: <link rel="canonical"href="<a href="http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool">http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool"/></link rel="canonical"href="<a>

Copy this link into the  section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool&sort=fun.

Keep in mind that that canonicals will stop the pages from ranking against each other, but they will still show up as duplicate content from a UI perspective, so we will still count them as duplicate."

Let me know if this answers your questions.

Mike

[_Thriveworks]

Mike, Thanks for the suggestion and help! - one thought - would it also be beneficial to add a no-index of subpages to the blog archives?

Meaning, if I want to prevent blog/page/33/, blog/page/34/. etc... of the blog archive from showing up in the search results, I would just no index the subpages to eliminate duplicate content.

[Mike.Goracke]

Yes. If you do not want the archived pages to be indexed you can use the noindex directive.

This will alert Google to not index those pages and also tell the SEOMoz crawler to not report errors or warnings on those pages.

Mike