URL paramters and duplicate content

[yacpro13]

Hello,

I have a 2-fold question:

1. Crawl Diagnostics is picking up a lot of Duplicate Page Title errors, and as far as I can tell, all of them are cause by URL parameters trailing the URL.

We use a Magento store, and all filtering attributes, categories, product pages etc are tagged on as URL parameters.

example:

Main URL:
/accessories.html

Duplicated Title Page URLs:

/accessories.html?dir=asc&order=position
/accessories.html?mode=list
/accessories.html?mode=grid
...and many others

How can I make the Crawl Diagnostics not identify these as errors?

2. Now from an SEO point of view, all these URL parameters are been picked up by google, and are listed in WedMaster Tools -> URL parameters.

All URL parameters are set to "let google decide".

I remember having read that Google was smart enough here to make the right decision, and we shouldn't have to worry about it.

Is this true, or is there a larger issue at hand here?

Thankas!

[danatanseo]

Hi yacpro13. We had a similar problem. We aren't on Magento, but definitely we had the same issue. For us it was a combination of several things. Make sure that your canonical tags are squared away In our case, we had a program running that was automatically writing canonical tags that matched these URLs with the URL parameters attached. Eventually we stopped using the parameters completely, but by then many of these pages had already been indexed (even though they weren't technically separate pages, Google saw them as such). No, Google definitely wasn't smart enough to decide. In our case, Google had sometimes indexed 4-5 versions of the same identical page, and of course we were getting dinged for having duplicate content.

Because we aren't using the parameters any more our solution was to ask Google to remove those URLs from the index. This is a painfully long process for a big site. We've already submitted over 500 remove requests and only about 1/2 have been completed. In your case, since it appears you are currently using parameters, this may not be the best solution. I would start with the canonical tags and investigate those and make sure they aren't part of the problem.

Good luck. Hope this helps a tiny bit.

[yacpro13]

I'm going to look into our canonical tags first - I think this is the best place to start.

Once this is done, I'll wait a week and see if the next scan yields fewer errors.

I'll keep you posted. Thanks.