Duplicate Content & Tags

[Tangled]

I've recently added tags to my blog posts so that related blog posts are suggested to visitors.

My understanding was that my robot.txt was handling duplicate content so thought it wouldn't be an issue but after Moz crawled by site this week is reported 56 issues of duplicate content in my blog.

I'm using Shopify, so I can edit the robot.txt file but is my understanding correct that if there are 2 or more tags then they will be ignored? I've searched the Shopify documents and forum and can't find a straight answer. My understanding of SEO is fairly limited.

Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b

[LearnInternetGrow]

Do you use Yoast SEO, or another plugin? The key is to set tags to no index so that the crawler only goes through your category links. The issue is that your tag URLs are being indexed and you don't want that. The option is under XML site map.

[Tangled]

I'm using Meta Tagger as the SEO plugin, I've not heard of Yoast SEO but will certainly check it out.

I understand that I need to exclude the tags from being crawled and think I might have worked it out but I'm not 100% sure, as I mentioned my understanding is fairly limited.

My URL which is being seen as duplicate content looks like this

http://www.tangled-yarn.co.uk/blogs/news/tagged/sock-knitting

If I exclude the handle 'tagged' from being index this should work. I think the code should be

{ % if handle contains "tagged" % }

{ % endif % }

Do you think this will work?

[Eric_Rohrback]

Yoast is a WordPress plugin, not Shopify so that option isn't available with the current CMS. Just wanted to chime in to make sure others aren't looking for Yoast SEO in the Shopify app store.

[Eric_Rohrback]

If the only option is to disallow via the robots.txt, then I would agree with your setup - disallow the slugs specific to the tags you don't want indexed. I've heard shopify is a little rough to work with sometimes because of the limitations, so whatever you can do I think is better than nothing. Remember that the robots exclusion is treated as a suggestion and not a command, so if it's possible to assign a no-index meta tag to those URL types that would be best case.

Looks like you're on the right track with the post below:

{ % if handle contains "tagged" % }

{ % endif % }

The one suggestion I would make is that you use noindex,follow so the content will still be crawled, but the duplicate tag won't get indexed. That would create multiple paths to the content on your site, but not create an index bloat issue with multiple tags.