Duplicate Content due to CMS

[ycheung]

The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100.

I am considering some solutions:

1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages

2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page).

Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?

[Ray-pp]

Hi ycheung - I believe you have a few things you can consider.

First we need to decide the following: Is it useful / beneficial to have the calendar indexed by Google? Will it bring in quality traffic to your website?

If the answer is 'No' then you should include a noindex rule (either meta or through the robots.txt file) to avoid indexing the pages all together.

If it is beneficial to have your calendar indexed by Google then you identify the main page of the calendar and have its child pages use a Canonical tag to identify the 1 main page as the appropriate page for Google to be indexing. This is usually done when the child pages are very similar to the parent, causing duplicate content just like in your example.

Both solutions should resolve your duplicate content issue.

[ycheung]

This is very helpful, thank you!