Duplicate Page Content

[HamiltonIsland]

Hi there,

We keep getting duplicate page content issues. However, its not actually the same page.
E.G - There might be 5 pages in say a Media Release section of the website. And each URL says page 1, 2 etc etc. However, its still coming up as duplicate. How can this be fixed so Moz knows its actually different content?

[FedeEinhorn]

Is the issue on the pagination? as sometimes some pages from categories/tags/etc can have the same content within an exact page.

If that's the issue, I would recommend you add a noindex meta to the least important pages (tags for example).

Hope that helps.

[HamiltonIsland]

Its basically all seperate pages/URL's with different information on each. However it seems to be crawled for each possible range of that page. e.g for check in/check out dates. It will search a range of dates and think that each page has different information. However, its all exactly the same.

[FedeEinhorn]

Can you provide us with some examples? It would make our job easier

[HamiltonIsland]

So they might look at this page: http://www.hihh.com.au/property-details?hihhpropertyId=HCP006&checkin=2013-08-06&checkout=2013-08-09&search=checkindate%3D2013-08-06%26checkoutdate%3D2013-08-09

Then the same page would come up on the error list but with different dates.

[RameshNair]

Did you try adding the rel="canonical" tag to the pages?

[FedeEinhorn]

Ah you mean that if the dates of the reservation changes then it creates a duplicate page content?

If that's the case, you should use the rel="canonical" the definite page, no dates selected, just the page that shows the property.

[gfiorelli1]

Federico is right.

Your duplicated content issue is due to the date parameters, hence you are potentially duplicating every page having that calendar for all the possible combination of dates... and that is an huge issue.

You should implement the rel="canonical" in order to have all these kind of URLs having as canonical the URL without the parameter.

Or, even better, you should implement the meta robots "noindex,nofollow" in every date parametered URL.

Said that, the most logical thing to do was to block these URLs via robots.txt when launching the site. Unfortunately, now blocking these URLs is not enough, as they are already indexed (even if they not appear in the index because they are filtered out by Google).

[FedeEinhorn]

Gianluca,

Wouldn't be much more work to identify if the parameter is set and then add the noindex meta? Wouldn't be easier to just set the canonical? I'm sure that's a dynamic site, just one canonical cal without using any extra code (PHP or whatever).

Why the nofollow? If I just preventing that page for being indexed as it would constitute a duplicate content issue, why the nofollow?, noindex should be enough in this case.

We recently fixed a similar issue with our blog tags, showing duplicate content on about 400 pages. We fixed that by adding the noindex (they already had the canonical but it wasn't enough as the canonical couldn't point to a definite version as that changed if the tag had or not another post on it). Within a few days all those pages were deindexed, we noticed a loss in search traffic and I decided to run a small test removing the noindex tag. Results: 2 weeks later none of those pages returned to the index (I added the noindex tag back as it was just a test to see if we could regain that traffic, but ultimately decided it wouldn't help to have a duplicate content issue for that lost traffic).

[gfiorelli1]

Hi!

I suggested the noindex in order to deindex pages that maybe are already indexed. But, yes, the rel="canonical" should be doing the same (the problem is that Google may not respect it).

The nofollow is order to not letting the crawler wasting budget crawl following the links of those (many) pages.

[HamiltonIsland]

Thanks all - will give those options a try and see which works the best for us.