URL Parameters causing duplicate content - Login/Registration page

[MattLacuesta]

All,

I just recently acquired a new client and right away I noticed an abundance of duplicate content being recorded after the moz crawl diagnostics was completed.

After a quick digest of the issue, it seems that the majority (90%) of the outlined duplicated content is stemming from the client's Login/Registration page. Upon clicking (without being logged-in) any asset or forum discussion board link within the site, the user is automatically redirected to the Login/Registration page, which seems to create this massive redirect loop associated with dynamic url parameters.

Ex. After clicking on a select internal link (asset or discussion board) the user is redirected to the Login/Register page which presents the page and a URL that looks a lot this this:

Ex. 1 https://www.clientsite.com/register-login?ReturnUr...xxxx%xxxx%xxxx%......

Ex. 2 https://www.clientsite.com**/register-login?returnurl=/register-login?returnurl=/register-login?returnurl=/page-titl**e/

These URLs seem to becoming larger and larger...

The client wants to ensure users have to Login/Register within their site before they're allowed to view the content. This process doesn't allow for any type of preview page to be viewed by a user prior to clicking on the internal link, which in turn doesn't allow any preview pages to be indexed.

Right now, Moz is picking up all of the redirect and labeling them as duplicate page content/duplicate page titles based on the Login/Registration page.

Questions/Comments:

• Would it be wise to create preview pages for the asset pages and discussion board pages to allow for proper indexing?

- Could this be a CMS issue? Current being used on this is, Kentico.

• There are thousands of pages being recorded in the crawl as duplicate, however only 14 seem to be indexing with duplicate title tags.

• 301 or canonical redirect strategy?

• Moz crawl data issue?

Again, this is my first look at this issue, so more information is bound to come out soon!

Please let me know if anyone has run into this issue and if you have a possible solution to get rid of this redirect loop process.

Thanks!

-T

[DirkC]

Hi,

The best way to find the source of the redirect loops is to perform a crawl with Screaming Frog - the moment you see these endless url's appearing - you stop the crawl - click on the url - right mouse button "Crawl Path Report" => this will lead you all the way back to the url where the error starts.

In your case, it could be sufficient to check the source of registration page and look for relative links containing /register-login - probably it's one small link hidden somewhere which is causing the problem. The crawl would be good to check if other loops exist.

The best way to avoid redirect loops is to use absolute rather than relative url's in your code - which makes it (almost) impossible to get these loops. Normally this should be something you can configure in your CMS.

If it's a login page - I would not put a canonical - it has no value for search engines (and for users who would land on this page), so I would put a noindex on these pages and nofollow on the links that point to this page.

rgds

Dirk

[DirkC]

I missed one question you asked - as Google is unable to index content which is only available for registered users I might be a good idea to create a preview page - showing part of the content even when not logged-in. This only makes sense however if the content remains interesting enough for visitors even if only part of it is accessible. You risk to get a high bounce rate on these pages, as the content really needs to be very unique and valuable for the users in order to go through the complicated process of registration. Personally, I always get frustrated when landing on these kind of pages, and unless it's a site that also seems useful for future visits, I always go back to the search results and try to find other sites which provide the info without registration.