Duplicate Content Reports

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ?

Cheers

Dan

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

You can use the parameter handling and setup canonical tags on the pages.

[CleverPhD]

You can also noindex those pages to simply take them out of the index and then later nofollow links to them.

[Dan-Lawrence]

HI Kurt

Do you mean both or one or the other ?

Isn't setting up canonical tags on all the possible dynamically generated login, sign up and registration type pages impossible e can you set up some sort of rule that applies to those unpredictable (since we dont know what they are until they are generated by a user session etc) pages ?

Cheers

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks Clever PHD

So is there a way of setting a general rule to apply noindex to all of these duplicates or do you mean to the main actual sign in/login pages which will hence apply to all new, sessions specific, duplicate versions of the main sign-in/log-in pages etc when generated ?

Cheers

Dan

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Hi Dan,

I mean both.  The canonical tag will help with duplicate content issues and the parameter handling will help with indexing.

Setting up the canonical tag shouldn't be an issue.  If the same page content is being displayed and the only difference is that the URL has some parameters in it, then the canonical tag should naturally be included with the rest of the page's code.  Since the canonical tag doesn't change, it should work perfectly.

For example, if you have a page, login.php, and that page always has a parameter, ?visitor=### (where ### is a random number), then you simply put the canonical tag in the head of the login.php page ().  That canonical tag will always be in the login.php page no matter whether the URL is login.php?visitor=123 or login.php?visitor=56, etc.  It will always tell the search engines that the original page login.php.

[CleverPhD]

I would answer the same as Kurt for the install.   You put the noindex tag in the header of the core page and so when all the other pages are generated with the parameters it will be added to those pages automatically.    Once you get the pages out of the index, then I would nofollow links or use robots.txt to those pages to keep the bots out to start with.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks Kurt

and what about the parameter handling tool ? if canonical tag method you mention will deal with this then is there any need to do anything with parameter handling tool ?

cheers

dan

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

You don't absolutely have to do both, but by doing the parameter handling you are sending another signal to Google of what you want them to do (keep in mind that both canonical and parameters are only considered suggestions by Google).  It's pretty simple to setup the parameter handling, so if you are really concerned about the duplicate content issues, why not do both?

Also, technically, the canonical tag tells Google which URL they've crawled to give prominence to when they are duplicate content, whereas my understanding is that parameter handling (when Google follows your suggestions) actually prevents Google from even crawling URLs with those parameters.  In other words, canonical tags tell Google what to do with URLs they've crawled and parameter handling tells Google what URLs not to even crawl.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Cool - Many thanks Kurt !

All Best

Dan