Duplicate content question...

[myfitstation]

I have a high duplicate content issue on my website. However, I'm not sure how to handle or fix this issue. I have 2 different URLs landing to the same page content. http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/vegan/ and http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/raw-food/ .In this situation, I cannot redirect one URL to the other since in the future I will probably be adding additional posts to either the "vegan" tag or the "raw food tag". What is the solution in this case?

Thank you

[GPainter]

Hello,

rel=canonical will fix this - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

What it does is tell Google "this page is a duplicate" then Google will only index one page. So in the head you would put the tag pointing to the page you want ranked.

Matt Cutts has said “I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing.”

So once you've done the canonical I wouldn't stress a great deal about the duplicate content (though I still recommend implementing the rel=canonical tag when possible)

Hope that helps a bit.

Good luck!

[RobLaughton]

Even better, just no-index your tag pages.

Depending on what CMS your using (wordpress?) it wont be easy implementing a rel=canonical tag on a tag page

Its general practice to no-index category and tag pages to avoid duplicate issues.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

Since you are planning on adding other articles to each tag I don't think canonical is the best way to go since they are not (or are not going to be) true duplicate content. The main problem is the use of tags which usually produce pages with content which is available elsewhere on the site and as such do not have anything really unique about them (except for the tag). No-indexing is one solution, check out these discussions for more details and some related links.

http://moz.com/community/q/dupe-content-canonicalize-the-wordpress-tag-or-noindex http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-tags-in-wordpress

[MikeRoberts]

Tag archives shouldn't be canonicalized because the hope is that you would be adding more content to both over time that would negate the relevancy of the canonical. Most people seem to NoIndex their tag archives... which is a fine solution considering Tag Archives have negligible benefits in Search. You could keep them indexed if you would prefer and the duplicate content issue will be solved once you add more content to each. Also, keep in mind that Matt Cutts, in a recent video, said that duplicate content will not penalize you if it is non-spammy... it just won't rank well (or at all) while duplicate.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

I think Chris had it right in the first response.  Use canonical tags on any duplicate content posts pointing to the one version you want to be the canonical version (so the canonical tag on both version needs to have the same canonical URL).  You don't have to use canonical tags on the unique pages, but you can if you want to.  Just set the canonical URL to the URL of that post.

The tags pages themselves don't matter.  Don't worry about them.  They won't cause you any issues.  It's the posts you need to be thinking about.  You also don't need to de-index anything.  The canonical tags on the post pages will fix the issue and you don't have to do anything about the tags page.

[myfitstation]

Thank you SO much for your helpful tips and advice!