Minimising duplicate content

[JonAcourt]

From a minimising duplicate content perspective is it best to create all blog posts with a single tag so google doesn't think the same post being returned via a different tag search is duplicate content. I.e. the urls below return the same blog post; or doesn't it matter.

for example

http://www.ukholidayplaces.co.uk/blog/?tag=/stay+in+Margate

http://www.ukholidayplaces.co.uk/blog/?tag=/Margate+on+a+budget

are the same posts...

thanks

[zigojacko]

No, assigning multiple tags to multiple pages on your website is good practice. (Providing they are of relevance of course).

What you should think about doing is only displaying excerpts for tag / search result pages so that it doesn't flag as duplicate content. You don't need to be displaying the entire post(s) for a tag page, a small snippet with a 'Read More' or similar link will ensure the full original is only ever at one location, it's specific URI.

[JonAcourt]

Thanks Geoff,

I wasn't sure after the recent updates.

Copy scape finds loads of matches but google didn't....

[zigojacko]

You're welcome Jonathan.

Feel free to see how a lot of other successful organisations implement this on their blogs on the web. Take Mashable for example, see their topics pages, these are essentially what blog articles are tagged with. Looks like they cut off their snippets at about 170 characters.

Also, ensure that you're using the canonical link element for blog article pages too to let search engines know that those are the originals and where you want the weight placed.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi!

Little late to the party here - thanks Geoff for helping out!!

While certainly creating excerpts on for the tag pages would be great - I'd suggest doing a crawl of your own site with something like Screaming Frog SEO Spider

I just did a crawl, and see a bunch of issues needing attention:

• Just about all of your meta descriptions are exactly the same
• Your H1s are all the same
• Bunch of duplicate titles (because for example, all the author archive subpages are being given the same title)
• I don't see any meta robots or canonical tags in use at all, which would be good to help control what pages you want indexed or counted for value.
• You have tons of meta keywords, mostly all duplicates, and the meta keywords tag should not be used anymore.

You've got some additional issues to work out besides just the tags thing.

Check webmaster tools to confirm this as well, Google webmaster tools will show you everything you need to fix!

-Dan