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
-
Unintentional wildcard 301 Redirect?
I have migrated a client's site to a new domain. I used Yoast tools to add 301 redirects for all active site pages from old domain to new domain in the .htacces files as neither the client nor I have access to hosting server via FTP (long story). Redirects are working as I intended, and we didn't lose too much in our rankings. Unfortunately, as soon as I saved the .htaccess file in Yoast, old-domain.net/wp-admin began redirecting to new-domain.net/wp-admin. I can no longer login to the wordpress site on the old domain. I did not enter a redirect for /wp-admin. Any thoughts on how this is happening or if there is some other way to get back in? Without server access, I'm pretty stumped. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c_estep_tcbguy0 -
301 redirect impact on ranking
If Website A is ranking 19th position in Google for a specific keyword, and Website B is ranking 30th position for the same keyword, What would be impact after 301 redirect? Will Website A drop to 30th position because of 301 or existing position would improve because of link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
301 Redirects... Redirect all content at once or in increments?
Hello, I have been reading a lot about site migration and 301s and sometimes get confused with conflicting suggestions from different sources... So, in a site migration. Should I 301 redirect all old URLs to the news at once or little by little? I've see this Google handout that suggests doing it all at once (minute 13)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Koki.Mourao
https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cfco632lor7bl55j3tg1g8332l0 But also have read the opposite in other forums...0 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags
Given that google have stated that duplicate content is not penalised is this really something that will give sufficient benefits for the time involved?Also, reading some of the articles on moz.com they seem very ambivalent about its use – for example http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsWill any page with a canonical link normally NOT be indexed by google?Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fdmgroup0 -
How do I best handle Duplicate Content on an IIS site using 301 redirects?
The crawl report for a site indicates the existence of both www and non-www content, which I am aware is duplicate. However, only the www pages are indexed**, which is throwing me off. There are not any 'no-index' tags on the non-www pages and nothing in robots.txt and I can't find a sitemap. I believe a 301 redirect from the non-www pages is what is in order. Is this accurate? I believe the site is built using asp.net on IIS as the pages end in .asp. (not very familiar to me) There are multiple versions of the homepage, including 'index.html' and 'default.asp.' Meta refresh tags are being used to point to 'default.asp'. What has been done: 1. I set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools, as most links already point to www. 2. The Wordpress blog which sits in a /blog subdirectory has been set with rel="canonical" to point to the www version. What I have asked the programmer to do: 1. Add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages. 2. Set all versions of the homepage to redirect to www.site.org using 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags. Have all bases been covered correctly? One more concern: I notice the canonical tags in the source code of the blog use a trailing slash - will this create a problem of inconsistency? (And why is rel="canonical" the standard for Wordpress SEO plugins while 301 redirects are preferred for SEO?) Thanks a million! **To clarify regarding the indexation of non-www pages: A search for 'site:site.org -inurl:www' returns only 7 pages without www which are all blog pages without content (Code 200, not 404 - maybe deleted or moved - which is perhaps another 301 redirect issue).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Create a link or redirect?
We have 60 demo movie pages on our site. We no longer link to these movie pages internally, because they are outdated; however, a lot of our partner companies are still linking to these pages. Some of these pages will have 10-15 linking root domains and a page authority of 30+... so pretty decent authority. These pages only include a movie on the pages, no links. I am trying to pass some of the link juice from these pages to other pages on our site. I am wondering if I should: A)Include transcripts on these pages, then link back to our current product page or solution pages? B)Set up redirects from these pages to a product or solution page? C)Set up a redirect to our homepage? Any advice? Thanks, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi everyone, I have a TLD in the UK with a .co.uk and also the same site in Ireland (.ie). The only differences are the prices and different banners maybe. The .ie site pulls all of the content from the .co.uk domain. Is this classed as content duplication? I've had problems in the past in which Google struggles to index the website. At the moment the site appears completely fine in the UK SERPs but for Ireland I just have the Title and domain appearing in the SERPs, with no extended title or description because of the confusion I caused Google last time. Does anybody know a fix for this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | royb0