Duplicate Pages , Do they matter ?

[Gardening4you]

I have been told buy the company who created my site that duplicate page warning are not a problem ? my site is small and only has 50 pages ( including product pages etc ) yet the crawl shows over 6500 duplicate pages am I right to be concerned?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Stephen

You have every right to be concerned here and duplicate content is a big problem but don't take my word for it:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

Lets try and forget any SEO mumbo jumbo and just think about this in common sense terms:

• 50 pages with 6500 duplicates means there are 130 versions of each page - which one should Google return in search?
• If Google is crawling your page and has 6500 pages to crawl how are they supposed to know which page is the right one?

I am guessing there are not actually 6500 versions of your pages so in all likelihood, this is some kind of URL based duplication with the page being returned on several URLs (or 130 URLs). What is more worrying is that if the Moz crawler found these pages they are all obviously crawlable so the internal link structure and information architecture is all out of whack.

Without examples it is tough to give advice but you have various options

1. Tidy up the URLs - remove any unnecessary URL parameters (this can be done in webmaster tools if your development company are unhelpful (as they certainly seem unknowledgeable and happy to hand out duff advice).
2. Implement a canonical URL
3. Improve the internal link structure so you only link to one version of each page (ideally combined with a canonical)

Ultimately we want just the 50 pages, a canonical URL, consistent internal linking and any confusing parameters dealt with in webmaster tools.

This kind of problem should be easily resolved and happy to give specific feedback if you wanted to post a link showing some examples.

Another good read:
http://moz.com/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

Hope that helps!
Marcus