Blog tags are creating excessive duplicate content...should we use rel canonicals or 301 redirects?
-
We are having an issue with our cilent's blog creating excessive duplicate content via blog tags. The duplicate webpages from tags offer absolutely no value (we can't even see the tag). Should we just 301 redirect the tagged page or use a rel canonical?
-
The easiest way to resolve issues with tags is to noindex them. I wrote a post about how you can safely do this: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now (you basically just double check to see if they are receiving traffic, and leave the few that receive traffic via search indexed).
But at the root level it comes down to knowing how to use tags correctly on a blogging platform to begin with - and knowing how they function, and what happens when you tag something.
First off, tagging any post creates a new page called a "tag archive". The only way someone can get to tag archives by default is if you allow some sort of navigation or links to them on the site itself. This is usually in the form of a "tag cloud" (sidebar or footer) or at the bottom of posts when it says "tagged in....." and links to the tags.
Then if they are internally linked to, they will get indexed (unless you noindex them like I have suggested above). They are typically low to no-value pages because most bloggers just tag everything, and use lots of tags per post. Then you end up with hundreds of pages (tag archives) with no value.
So noindexing them is the safest way to go, except for very extreme cases where a blogger uses them 100% perfect (which is rare, so I always assume most people asking should just noindex but use my post to check for traffic to any of them first).
-
Thanks for chiming in! Just to reiterate something - canonical tags are only a suggestion, not a hard directive. Google can and does ignore them. The canonical tag and also pass noindexing directives to the page you point them at. So with tag archives, if they are set to noindex and you canonical them to posts, you might deindex your posts.
And finally, canonical is only something that should be used that can't be solved via indexation, crawling or architecture solutions. In the case of tags in a blogging system (probably wordpress) the easiest and 100% definite way to handle tags is just to noindex them. Then you don't need to worry about canonicals or duplicate content.
Also, tags are no harmful because of duplicate content per se, but just that they add a lot of unneeded pages to the index.
-
You can set tags to noindex/follow. If you're using WordPress and one of the more popular SEO plugins, this could be done with a couple of clicks. But are these tags actually generating duplicate content? Usually a snippet of the tagged posts isn't considered duplicate.
Anyway, noindex should be more effective than it was in the past. And as Highland has said, setting a canonical would be a good idea as well.
If the tags aren't really helping out site users, they aren't using them - etc., and they don't have any link equity - you could just 410 them. Plus you could submit the tag URLs for removal in GWT.
So check the referral traffic and backlinks for those pages and go with either removal or noindex follow and a canonical.
-
Canonical hands down. This is what canonical was made for anyways: duplicate content you can't remove.
Canonical simply lets you tell Google which duplicate content should "win" the indexation race and Google will take it into consideration. I can think of many reasons why you'd have overlapping tags but would not want to remove them (which is what a 301 would do)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Move to new domain using Canonical Tag
At the moment, I am moving from olddomain.com (niche site) to the newdomain.com (multi-niche site). Due to some reasons, I do not want to use 301 right now and planning to use the canonical pointing to the new domain instead. Would Google rank the new site instead of the old site? From what I have learnt, the canonical tag lets Google know that which is the main source of the contents. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | india-morocco0 -
Duplicate Content That Isn't Duplicated
In Moz, I am receiving multiple messages saying that there is duplicate page content on my website. For example, these pages are being highlighted as duplicated: https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/pop-art-graffiti/farm-with-barn-and-animals-wall-mural-3824 and https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/animals-wildlife/little-elephants-garden-seamless-pattern-wall-mural-3614. As you can see, both pages are different products, therefore I can't apply a 301 redirect or canonical tag. What do you suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | e3creative0 -
Review site using canonical tag in a puzzling way.
Have just been looking at a review site and they're using the canonical tag very strangely, to me. For example, they may have several pages of reviews of the same item - they use the canonical tag on page 2/3/4 to point back at page 1 - and yet there is no duplication between the pages. Any idea why they might be doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate Content / Canonical Conundrum on E-Commerce Website
Hi all, I’m looking for some expert advice on use of canonicals to resolve duplicate content for an e-Commerce site. I’ve used a generic example to explain the problem (I do not really run a candy shop). SCENARIO I run a candy shop website that sells candy dispensers and the candy that goes in them. I sell about 5,000 different models of candy dispensers and 10,000 different types of candy. Much of the candy fits in more than one candy dispenser, and some candy dispensers fit exactly the same types of candy as others. To make things easy for customers who need to fill up their candy dispensers, I provide a “candy finder” tool on my website which takes them through three steps: 1. Pick your candy dispenser brand (e.g. Haribo) 2. Pick your candy dispenser type (e.g. soft candy or hard candy) 3. Pick your candy dispenser model (e.g. S4000-A) RESULT: The customer is then presented with a list of candy products that they can buy. on a URL like this: Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A All of these steps are presented as HTML pages with followable/indexable links. PROBLEM: There is a duplicate content issue with the results pages. This is because a lot of the candy dispensers fit exactly the same candy (e.g. S4000-A, S4000-B and S4000-C). This means that the content on these pages are the basically same because the same candy products are listed. I’ll call these the “duplicate dispensers” E.g. Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-B Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-C The page titles/headings change based on the dispenser model, but that’s not enough for the pages to be deemed unique by Moz. I want to drive organic traffic searches for the dispenser model candy keywords, but with duplicate content like this I’m guessing this is holding me back from any of these dispenser pages ranking. SOLUTIONS 1. Write unique content for each of the duplicate dispenser pages: Manufacturers add or discontinue about 500 dispenser models each quarter and I don’t have the resources to keep on top of this content. I would also question the real value of this content to a user when it’s pretty obvious what the products on the page are. 2. Pick one duplicate dispenser to act as a rel=canonical and point all its duplicates at it. This doesn’t work as dispensers get discontinued so I run the risk of randomly losing my canonicals or them changing as models become unavailable. 3. Create a single page with all of the duplicate dispensers on, and canonical all of the individual duplicate pages to that page. e.g. Canonical: candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series Duplicates (which all point to canonical): candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=A candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=B candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=C PROPOSED SOLUTION Option 3. Anyone agree/disagree or have any other thoughts on how to solve this problem? Thanks for reading.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webmethod0 -
Duplicate Titles caused by blog
Hey I've done some research and understand the canonical tags and rel prev and rel next, but I wanted to get someones opinion on if we needed it since the articles are somewhat independent of each in content (there's a focus on both banks and accountants) We have over 68 pages of blog materials http://www.sageworks.com/blog/default.aspx?page=7 through http://www.sageworks.com/blog/default.aspx?page=68 Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh1230 -
Why does SEOmoz bot see duplicate pages despite I am using the canonical tag?
Hello here, today SEOmoz bot found and marked as "duplicate content" the following pages on my website: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3 http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf And I am wondering why considering the fact I am using on both those pages a canonical tag pointing to the main product page below: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html Shouldn't SEOmoz bot follow the canonical directive and not report those two pages as duplicate? Thank you for any insights I am probably missing here!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0