Duplicated content, Noindex nofollow or canonical?

[jcolman]

Hey Joel, the title of you questions reminds me a lot of this SEOmoz post, which I think goes a long way toward answering your questions.  I also use robots.txt liberally to block deprecated content and URLs and it's been effective at reducing duplicate content.

[krissy-cca]

I would recommend you use 'noindex, nofollow' as if they are complete duplicates and are of no use to users then no-one, including search engines needs to see them.

Use the canonical tag when you have very similar content on a page that is used by users E.G. different colours of the same product.

DD

edit - Jonathon's link to that blog explains everything you need to know in more detail

[rhutchings]

noindex the extra pages.  thats where you should focus your SEO and link building as well, so it all goes to the same url.  It wont do you any good to have that duplicated content, regardless of canocical tags.

[G-Force]

Hi Joel,

Instead of trying to fix this problem by adding even more stuff, I would try to get rid of this problem by removing stuff.

So, can you explain why the product description, the images and the add product to the cart stuff couldn't be on the same page?

By putting all these on the same page, first, the user wouldn't have to crawl 3 different pages to see everything, search engine spiders neither, all the content would be on the same page and you wouldn't have the duplicate content problem you're having now.

Is it something you think you could implement?

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[rhutchings]

agree

[ChrisMacNaughton]

Generally I would suggest that you stick with canonical or, if you'd rather, 301 truely duplicate pages( they are exactly the same) and just canonical the pages that, like Damien Dawson said, are just different colors or are otherwise similar.

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[krissy-cca]

Yes you're right... Without knowing exactly what the pages are used for it's hard to come up with a solution. Check the backlinks to those dup pages; if there is any 'no index, follow' the pages - if not nofollow them.