Duplicate content question

[TheaterMania]

Hi there,

I work for a Theater news site. We have an issue where our system creates a chunk of duplicate content in Google's eyes and we're not sure how best to solve.

When an editor produces a video, it simultaneously 1) creates a page with it's own static URL (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html); and 2) displays said video on a public index page (http://www.theatermania.com/videos/). Since the content is very similar, Google sees them as duplicate.

What should we do about this? We were thinking that one solution would to be dynamically canonicalize the index page to the static page whenever a new video is posted, but would Google frown on this?

Alternatively, should we simply nofollow the index page?

Lastly, are there any solutions we may have missed entirely?

[Ray-pp]

Many times, WordPress users (and similar CMS') noindex their media categories to prevent duplicate content. I suggest noindexing the media category if you have a main page for the videos.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

There is no real issue with either noindex or rel=canonical. Which one I would choose would depend if you have been penalised for this already?

Canonical is used to tell search engines of a preferred page, and is used to handle duplication issues, but I wouldn't create a constantly changing canonical in this manner. I would set the http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html to canonical back to http://www.theatermania.com/videos/, as this is the main page for all videos.

-Andy

[EricaMcGillivray]

Sounds like your index page is most helpful for users to see all your videos than for Google and other search engines. I'd either figure out a way for your index page to be less duplicate content or just de-index. I'd imagine that most searches which land a user to your site are going to be for specific videos, not general videos made by your brand. The latter group of folks will likely land on your homepage.