Internal Duplicate Pages causing dip in rankings

[Webmaster_SEO]

Hi Guys,

Need help in understanding whether having duplicate pages on your site push you down in rankings. Our all product pages getting indexed by Google with different parameters i.e. filters, affiliate id, utm_source etc. and then we have 10-15 duplicate for one product page. I am observing dip in rankings whenever Google starts indexing these duplicate but when I asked this question to John Muller and other Google team they said if you set up canonical then you don't have to worry about having different urls for same page but we are not ranking on Google and if we do then we dropped from page 1 to page 2 or sometimes page 3.

Example - http://goo.gl/G5p3X5

Any suggestions.

[TomRayner]

Hi there

John Mueller is right, if you have a canonical tag in place like that then you shouldn't have to worry about those duplicate pages.

The reason why your page variations are being indexed is because you've implemented the canonical tag incorrectly.  At the moment, you have it written like this:

Your missing the quotations from the canonical section.  It should read like this:

That should fix the problem and also fix the duplicate URLs from being indexed.

Hope this helps.

[Webmaster_SEO]

Hi Tom, Thank you so much for pointing this out. I was not aware to the fact that quotation can make a such big difference. Thanks Again.

[TheeDigital]

As an addition to what Tom has said, you should also setup parameter exclusions in webmaster tools to make sure pages with these appended parameters do not get indexed.