How best to deal with internal duplicate content

[daedriccarl]

hi

having an issue with a client site and internal duplicate content. The client has a custom cms and when they post new content it can appear, in full, at two different urls on the site. Short of getting the client to move cms, which they won't do, I am trying to find an easy fix that they could do themselves.

ideally they would add a canonical on one of the versions but the cms does allow them to view posts in html view, also would be a lot if messing about wth posting the page and then going back to the cms and adding the tag. the cms is unable to auto generate this either. The content editors are copywriters not programmers.

Would there be a solution using wmt for this? They have the skill level to be able to add a url in wmt so im thinking that a stop gap solution could be to noindex one of the versions using the option in webmaster tools. Ongoing we will consult developers about modifying the cms but budgets are limited so looking for a cheap and quick solution to help until the new year.

anyone know of a way other than wmt to block Google from seeing duplicate content. We can block Google from folders because only a small percentage of the content in the folder would be internally duplicate.

would be very grateful for any suggestions anyone could offer.

thanks.

[RangeMarketing]

Hi Carl,

If you have absolutely no way of adding a canonical tag or meta noindex tag to the individual pages then I believe, for now, disallowing the indexing of pages using robots.txt or the Remove URLs tool in GWT is your best option. You could also 301 redirect the duplicate page if you can edit an .htaccess file, although, this too should only be used as a temporary solution.

Here is some additional info about robots.txt if needed: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

Hope that helps!

[daedriccarl]

thanks for reminding me of the robots option. Overlooked that. Will propose it

[RangeMarketing]

Of course. No problem!