Duplicate Content Issue with

[JamesPiper]

Hello fellow Moz'rs!

I'll get straight to the point here -

The issue, which is shown in the attached image, is that for every URL ending in /blog/category/name, it has a duplicate page of /blog/category/name/?p=contactus. Also, its worth nothing that the ?p=contact us are not in the SERPs but were crawled by SEOMoz and they are live and duplicate.

We are using Pinnacle cart. Is there a way to just stop the crawlers from ?p=contactus or?

Thank you all and happy rankings,

James

[Copstead]

I believe you can just add this to your robots.txt file and you will be alright.

Disallow: ?p=contactus

[josh-riley]

I like using robots.txt for stuff. - mostly because our homegrown cms limits our abilities.s however, if these pages have already been indexed then disallow limits the outcome. Ideally, disallow or no index or any of those are done in advance so Google doesn't get their hands on it; doing it after the fact can take some time for Google to figure it out and put the pieces together. Can your site manage a canonical for this?

[JamesPiper]

I have done some deeper digging and since Google has already uncovered the *?p=contactus URLs, it seems like canonical would be the optimal route. However, there are about 300 pages of this and would drive the IT department insane.

I have also looked into using Google Webmaster Tool's parameter setting. I would love to hear if this has worked for someone, and would the parameter I set to ignore be *?p=contactus

Thanks so much again!

[josh-riley]

I have used disallow parameters for all kinds of things; you can set it up and test it in Webmaster tools under "crawler access" before you implement on your site to confirm it's done properly.  There have been a few times I've had to tweak it to get exactly what I wanted.

I'd test with the "/" in front of it as one option - again, just in testing, to see if there's any difference in results.

Since Google already got a hold of it, it'll take a lot of time to see results but don't be discouraged since they have to re-crawl and figure it out.

Good luck