Duplicate URL Parameters for Blog Articles

[Xtend-Life]

Hi there,

I'm working on a site which is using parameter URLs for category pages that list blog articles.

The content on these pages constantly change as new posts are frequently added, the category maybe for 'Heath Articles' and list 10 blog posts (snippets from the blog). The URL could appear like so with filtering:

• www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general

• www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016

• www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=1

• All pages currently have the same Meta title and descriptions due to limitations with the CMS, they are also not in our xml sitemap

I don't believe we should be focusing on ranking for these pages as the content on here are from blog posts (which we do want to rank for on the individual post) but there are 3000 duplicates and they need to be fixed.

Below are the options we have so far:

Canonical URLs

Have all parameter pages within the category canonicalize to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general and generate dynamic page titles (I know its a good idea to use parameter pages in canonical URLs).

WMT Parameter tool

Tell Google all extra parameter tags belong to the main pages (e.g. www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=3 belongs to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general).

Noindex

Remove all the blog category pages, I don't know how Google would react if we were to remove 3000 pages from our index (we have roughly 1700 unique pages)

We are very limited with what we can do to these pages, if anyone has any feedback suggestions it would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

What I would do is go with both the canonical URLs as the Google Search Console parameters, in order to make sure first that the pages won't be seen as duplicates with the canonical URLs and in addition to that you might want to make sure that Google isn't visiting these pages at all in order to save your crawl budget for the more important pages on your site.

Martijn.

[anthonydnelson]

I would simply set up rel=next/prev on the paginated series and not so much worry about duplicate title tags or using canonical tags. You want to make sure Google continues to crawl deep into your blog pagination and can access older blog posts.

[Xtend-Life]

Thanks Anthony,

We are using rel=prev/next on the pagination for these blog pages which does reduce duplication, but because of the parameter filters we still have thousands of duplicates.

That's a good point about the indexing of older blogs!

[Xtend-Life]

Thanks Martijn,

That sounds like a good idea, we were also considering a Javascript loading option where we remove the pagination and load content on scroll - I am still 50/50 whether or not hidden content like this is crawled or ignored.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hard to say these days if they do respect the scroll effect there unfortunately.