6,000 duplicate pages

[SeaDrive]

We have an e-commerce website that sells women swimsuits.  We are getting around 6,000 pages of duplicate content.  I think the way we had the search option built is contributing to this issues.  Can I block non static pages?  I’m not sure what to do.

Thanks for any help

[NEdocs]

Hey SeaDrive,

Having a link to the site would definitely help with the answer here, but for starters you could look into blocking your search result pages (or the offending pages) with your robots.txt. Depending on their URL structure, this could be a quick way to block any search result pages from indexing. Here is some info from Google on Robots.txt.

Also, do you have your rel="canonical" link elements in place? If your issue is related to your internal search, using canonical URLs will absolutely help to resolve your issue. Generally speaking, online shopping is no stranger to content being accessed via different URL structures (especially if your search is serving up dynamic URLs) - so help Google out and define a canonical URL for content that can be accessed from multiple URLs (ie. which pages are considered "master pages"). Info on canonical urls.

Hope this helps!

[unikey]

We had a similar issue, with thousands of duplicate content pages. Most of these were pages that didn't really need to be indexed. For instance, our store has a review feature where customers receive an email a few weeks after ordering to review the product they received. Every product has a unique url for this but the pages aren't really meant to be accessed outside of the email so they were not optimized and we didn't really have a way to optimize them. We felt they didn't need to be indexed. So, we added some disallows to our robots.txt file and that cleaned most of them up, leaving just the legit duplicate content that we wanted to get fixed.

The jury is still out on any kind of seo improvement but it stands to reason that the crawler will be able to find the important pages on our site much quicker and no longer is seeing duplicate content.

[SeaDrive]

Thanks Christopher,

I will look into rel="canonical".  and blocking the search in the robots.txt.  I'm just not sure I will be able to do this with the dynamic search results or where I would add the rel="canonical".

https://suityourselfswimwear.com/

[NEdocs]

Hey SeaDrive,

Should be pretty simple - if you can confirm that the duplicate pages as search result pages. The search function has a consistent URL structure, so by blocking **/products.php?sq= **we can limit the indexing of any search result content.

Add to your robots.txt: Disallow: /products.php?sq=

As for the rel="canonical", you can have them written in automatically depending on what platform your site is built on. If you happen to be running on WordPress there are some options via plugins.

As for the rel="canonical" placement, it is essentially a way to tell bots which page is the preferred/primary page. So you will have a canonical element on just about every page (changing depending on the page in question).

Sorry if that is confusing - it is always better when you can hear it from Matt Cutts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM

Good luck!

watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM