Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Erica.

We're deindexing the tags pages for now and going to see what happens. If all goes well, we might deindex the category pages as well.

Thanks!

This is certainly what we've heard and it's good to hear of a real case where you went from indexing to noindexing. My bet is that we would have the same result, my hope is that we would have an increase over time, and my fear is that we'll have a decrease.

We do upgrade our blog twice a week and keep a pretty good spread across our categories and tags.

The hope is that we'll have the boost you mentioned, in long-tail and whatnot, but the fear is that it could hurt us (like Erica mentioned above).

Like Erica, we haven't seen any negativity, but we wonder if we're being affected without even knowing it and by setting them to noindex we could potentially get a boost. It's a dream, we just don't want the opposite to happen.

Looking for some advice on a duplicate content issue that we're having that definitely isn't unique to us.

See, we are allowing all our tag and category pages, as well as our blog pagination be indexed and followed, but Moz is detecting that all as duplicate content, which is obvious since it is the same content that is on our blog posts.

We've decided in the past to keep these pages the way they are as it hasn't seemed to hurt us specifically and we hoped it would help our overall ranking. We haven't seen positive or negative signals either way, just the warnings from Moz.

We are wondering if we should noindex these pages and if that could cause a positive change, but we're worried it might cause a big negative change as well.

Have you confronted this issue? What did you decide and what were the results?

Thanks in advance!

Thanks so much, Robert!

We'll start by setting the canonical URL to the page we want to rank and see what happens over the next little while, then decide on moving forward with the 301 after we have some more data.

Thanks again!

Hi Robert,

This makes a heck of a lot of sense. A couple of years ago it made sense for us to use two different pages that were targeted to each keyword, but now with Google's semantic updates they can both do well for two (and more) related keywords.

Given our current situation, we would much prefer the page (roofing-software) to rank as opposed to the one that's currently ranking. Given that the one that is currently ranking is older (probably the reason it's ranking instead of the other), would you think it would be a good idea to 301 from the currently ranking page and merge the existing ranked content with the page that isn't ranking in order to try to rank the other page instead?

Or does it make more sense to try to use the ranked page? W would be willing to do this out of necessity, but the other keyword is much better performing for us.

What is the best practice in this instance?

Thank you!

Hi Justin!

Many thanks for the response. Up until about a month ago we've had "Roofing Software" in the H1 but decided to change the H1 to try to increase conversions. We'll add it back and see if that helps to get it ranked in the meantime.

All other on-page factors are optimized as far as we can tell, we'll see if we can make any adjustments to our linking structure, and will continue to build offsite links where possible.

Thank you!

Thanks Erica.

We're deindexing the tags pages for now and going to see what happens. If all goes well, we might deindex the category pages as well.

Thanks!

Hi Robert,

This makes a heck of a lot of sense. A couple of years ago it made sense for us to use two different pages that were targeted to each keyword, but now with Google's semantic updates they can both do well for two (and more) related keywords.

Given our current situation, we would much prefer the page (roofing-software) to rank as opposed to the one that's currently ranking. Given that the one that is currently ranking is older (probably the reason it's ranking instead of the other), would you think it would be a good idea to 301 from the currently ranking page and merge the existing ranked content with the page that isn't ranking in order to try to rank the other page instead?

Or does it make more sense to try to use the ranked page? W would be willing to do this out of necessity, but the other keyword is much better performing for us.

What is the best practice in this instance?

Thank you!