Duplicate Content in Blog

[Studio33]

Hi,

SEOMoz on-page analysis is reporting that our blog has duplicate content when technically it doesn't.

Is this something that we need to address as it will actually be hurting our ranking or is this just a SEOMoz software quirk?

There is 100+ example like this but here is one example. SEOMoz is reporting

http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog/author/InvoiceStudio?page=1

and

http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog/author/InvoiceStudio?page=2

as a duplicate content and Title Tag.

Thanks

Andrew

[Johnny4B]

Its reporting that your Title and Description within your Meta tags are duplicated

And its right ,they are

Title Tag - Online Invoicing Software,UK Small Business

Description Tag  - Learn more about Online Invoicing, managing and collecting payments with the Invoice Studio blog as well as keep up to date on all the latest UK small business news

You should make all these unique to the content on the page

[TomRayner]

Hey Andrew

You actually have a potential duplicate content problem with these pages.  If you look at:

http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog/author/InvoiceStudio

http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog/author/InvoiceStudio?page=1

The same content is on the page.  The URL with ?page=1 is obviously query generated, but there's every chance that Google will try to index this URL in its current format.  If it does that, then the two URLs will have duplicate content, in Google's eyes.

As you only have one physical page, but multiple potential URLs, I'd recommend using a canonical tag.  You could add a rel=canonical tag to http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog/author/InvoiceStudio pointing to the same URL - eg: rel="canonical" href="http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog/author/InvoiceStudio" />.  This will tell Google that this version of the URL is the original and ask the bot to ignore any dynamic URLs generated from it.  That will prevent the URLs from being indexed, thus removing any chance of duplicate content.

Hope that helps with that particular issue.

[Studio33]

Great answer, thanks