Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?

[Court_H]

I agree it is best to get the individual pages indexed.  Dont have dynamic pages.  Instead come up with categories that make sense, have them indexed.

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

The best way to handle this is via the URL Parameters Setting in Google Webmaster or a robots.txt file.

Google added this functionality to handle the exact issues your'e describing, so there's no need to drastically change functionalities which would likely require editing core files in your CMS.

If you click on URL Parameters under Site Configuration in Google Webmaster you will find a list of queries and for each one there available options that instruct google as to how to handle these pages.

To do this:

1. Click Edit for the Paramater you'd like to configure (i.e. course, cooking, etc).

2. In the Dropdown Menu, select Yes. Changes, reorders, or narrow page contents.

3. Choose the option that best describes how the parameter affects the page content.

4. Choose how GoogleBot should crawl these pages.

• I usually choose "Let GoogleBot Decide" as it's Google your trying to please ;). I've designed and optimized several eCommerce store with multiple parameters and this option handles the crawling and indexing of these pages correctly 99% of the time. If you still experience Duplicate Content issues after editing these settings, simply choose the Ignore option.

Dynamic websites are very common these days and this tool is designed by Google specifically to handle parameters in the best possible way and allow Google to understand the URL structure of your site.. The "Don't have dynamic URLs solution" isn't a solution at all, as many modern functionalities rely on dynamic URLs, such as layered navigation in Magento or other eCommerce platforms. How do you suggest filtering products by price, size, color, etc without creating dynamic URLs? These functionalities IMPROVE user experience and navigation. The text in the address bar isn't always the important factor when a user is navigating a site.

Don't overthink it.

Take advantage of the functionality and only de-index pages that are causing duplicate content problems. If you notice specific dynamic URLs are appearing in SERPs too often then create a 301 redirect from that dynamic URL to a landing page with more user friendly URL.

Hope this helps.

Anthony

[coreymanshack]

• Setting canonical tag, you should be already doing this rather it's a problem here or not as outlined in seomoz tools you may be missing out on link juice.

I agree with this guy, but I would like to add, why do you want google to crawl your searchable index? Aren't all of your recipes found on your site already by picking categories from a menu?

[CustomerSolutionz]

This post is deleted!

[SDSLaw]

Take Lonnie's advice. Install Yoast. Use the rel=next tags that the software inserts for you automatically. Yoast will fix it all.

Another WP plugin is called htaccess control. And it is also used for this same purpose... It's a little simpler than the Yoast plugin, and if you already have an SEO plugin you like-- or worst yet-- it is built into your theme, like Thesis...

Just go with htaccess control. It is simple to use and your problems will be solved in minutes.

[bowravenseo]

Setting canonical tags would be the way I would go, but make sure you have got good seo on the rest of the site for the recipies etc.

[vbestic]

Solution:

1. Download "All in one SEO" plugin

2. Go to plugin settings. Check these settings:

Use no inxex for  -categories

-tags

-search   (!)

-Achieves

That will prevent duplicate content issues if you use Wordpress.

[toddmumford]

The best way to fix the issue is address it from the server level - so page level creation and urls.

Link canonical is good, but is really a tier three level fix.

Starting at the root is best. You will want to ensure you have:

1. A logical taxonomy, which is a breakdown of the core topic into sub-categories for classification purposes
2. A logical way to tag categories and entities with meaningful tags, or search based on title, content (tags or keys work well - a programmer should be able to help with this)
3. Rewriting the urls as was mentioned so that any urls exported are always exact urls and not using variables or queries
4. 301 redirect appropriate core query urls to the new urls, and implement internal links to the new urls to reinforce that content and show search engines that it is priority.
5. Continue to run reports regularly and monitor the amount of duplicate content.

[Moving-Web-SEO-Auckland]

Every site you monitor should have a keyword distribution sheet in excel.

Each line will have the url, meta description, title tag, and h1 tag showing (LEN) character count  for meta details. With a further column showing the keywords targeted for each page.

With this you have a way to monitor each page in a more direct visual way and avoid duplication, especially titles and meta descriptions.

[jpndk]

As this question is rather old but still is marked as "unanswered" I take the liberty to post an answer this late which I hope not only you will benefit from but all other webmasters/SEOs with similar issues.

First of all: Duplicate pages and therefrom duplicate title-tags etc. are of course meant to be taken serious but there are no easy fixes in my opinion and especially not if your design and database set-up is causing large amounts of duplicated content.

But is it a big problem Google-wise? I have my doubts based on conflicting signs and indications given by Google Webmaster Tools and the SERPs in general.

An example I just dug up for you: One of the big players in the field of recipes (allrecipes.com) has +5.000 search results indexed by Google ALL with duplicate title-tags which would bring up all the red flags in the Dashboard.

But based on Googles trends for searches, allrecipes.com are still outperforming their closest competitors. Their search result-urls are unique but all have the same title-tag...so +5.000 duplicate title-tags is probably not really a problem in their perspective.

What to do then?

All though your website seems to have been designed with quite a few potential problems built into its core I would personally hesitate spending a lot of resources on fixing it, especially if your traffic from Google is not taking a bashing.

Eventually your website will be in need for a design re-do and perhaps a change of content management system/database system.

Plan ahead and make sure that you will be able to control this issue in your next version.

It could f. i. be by having all search results appear more like individual pages with individual urls. With a little bit of effort you could make each search result unique with unique title tag and url and thereby bring more traffic to your site.

Best of luck with your efforts

Jens Peter

[Esaky]

For few of the page title has warning for my blog campgain has duplicate title !

We used Photoshop tutorials, when we create new article on different new techniques ! what i can't change them ! Because traffic and social votes will be affected.

WordPress slug Changing will become 404 error to the medium and high PA . Before using All in seo Plugin,  I don't know that we should use short length url ! so i used the same title in the url ? i don't want to change it ?

any solution ?

[OrionGroup]

smaavie, are you going pick one of these fine answers to mark this Q&A as "Answered"?

[rsmb]

I read all the replies and question is still unanswered.

I have the exact same problem with WordPress when using nextpage tag to split a single post into multiple pages.

Wordpress SEO plugin from Yoast doesn't handle this.  If I create a blog one post with 3 more pages, url structure looks like the following

www.example.com/post-link/

www.example.com/post-link/1/

www.example.com/post-link/2/

www.example.com/post-link/3/

With Wordpress SEO Plugin, I can set Title and Description for just ONCE ( not for all 4 pages). This results in Duplicate Title Tags.

Possible Solution 1: Re-write Title using wp_title if page is >= 2. Appending page number to the Title could fix this.

Possible Solution 2: Add www.example.com/post-link/ as canonical link in Advanced Tab of Wordpress SEO

[WesleySmits]

I agree that you shouldn't try to get search pages indexed.
Google loves clean URL's and "?course=starter" is not really a clean URL.

One of the reasons why Google doesn't like this is because it's not good for the user experience.
Nobody is gonna remember a url with ? and = in it.

My recommendation would definitely be to change the structure of the website that every recipe has it's own page and that these recipes are sorted into categories. Then you can still use the search function so that people will be able to search and they will find their recipes. Trying to get these pages higher in Google may help in some ways, but i think it will serve you better to focus on getting pages with a clean URL structure higher in Google.This should also improve your CTR (Click Through Rate) because people trust websites more if they understand the URL.

About the duplicate content issues. Search pages are not really meant to be indexed by search engines in my experience. I always no-index the search pages because of the possible duplicate content issues and they are custom pages which appear bases on what a user does. Not something i would want to get found on in the search engines.

I hope I helped, if anything is unclear or you need more advice or have a different question than please let me know.