PortfolioID urls appearing in my wordpress site- what to do?

[Swanny_s]

Hey guys,

Hoping someone may have some advice on a wordpress site.

Most of their URL's are duplicates due to a PortfolioID appearing in the URLs causing a duplicate title tags
It's the same page but it's being flagged as duplicate.

Would you remove the portfolioID url or 301 redirect?

Many thanks
Simon

[GlobeRunner]

Simon, I'm not sure where you're seeing the duplicates, but generally speaking there are a few ways to deal with this:

• use the robots.txt file to disallow indexing of the duplicate URLs (keep them but disallow from being indexed if they're helpful for users

• remove the PortfolioIDs entirely from the site. If they're not needed and they're not helpful to users then I would remove them entirely.

• set up canonical tags so that even though they're crawled they will still pass on the credit to the main URL.

[Carson-Ward]

Generally I'd not worry too much about duplicate warnings like this, especially if the duplicate pages are being created by parameters. Though Moz won't be able to see it, check Google's search console (AKA webmaster tools) under parameters to see how many portfolio IDs are being crawled. You can even set the parameter manually, though I find "Let Googlebot decide" usually works just fine.

The canonical tag is a good idea. Definitely use a canonical tag that to point back to the original version of the page. Without seeing the site I can't give you more specific info than that.

I'd probably not use robots.txt, just because I'd worry your content would be harder to crawl once a session is tagged with profile ID. It all depends on where users/bots pick up the profile ID variable from.