Forum post multiple pages gives meta description duplicate.
-
My website has a forum that is using the title of the posts as a Meta Description.The problem is that when a posts becomes long and separates in pages Google tells me that i have duplicate meta description issues because the 2nd page and the 3rd page are using the same meta description.What is the best course of action here?
-
I don't think canonicalization would be inappropriate here. Each page is different, but each page of a forum topic is supporting the OPs' main post on the first page. You can canonical the subsequent pages and pass the authority to the main page so it ranks highest.
If someone uses a specific search term that another person used on page 4 of the topic, that page will still show in Google's SERPs and direct the user to the deeper page, rather than the main page. So, we're not applying a canonical tag because of duplicate content issues, but to support the forum topic's parent theme.
I suggest adding rel/next logic to your site's theme and let Google rank the subsequent pages accordingly. Once proper canonical and rel/next tags are implemented, I wouldn't worry about duplicate meta information.
-
In my experience the only way to resolve that is to write unique descriptions or have Google skip the pages.
There is also Pagination, but I've seen cases where after implementing the next and prev code it still was serving Duplicate description errors.
Hope you find your answer!
-
No indexing the rest of the pages means less results on SERP.
Canonicalising the other pages to page 1 is kinda wrong since its not duplicate content and passing all the link juice to just page 1 is not such a good idea.
-
Hi Angelos,
There are a few ways you can resolve this issue:
- noindex the page2, page3s by applying any subsequent pages as a rule
- canonicalise all page2 & page3s to the original post URLs
- update your robots.txt file to block page2 and page3 by using Disallow: /*/page2, Disallow: //*page3
Any of the above will resolve your issue, just comes down to which is the easiest for you to implement.
Feel free to tweet me at @StelinSEO if you've got any further questions
Stel
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
-
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
Best way to handle Breadcrumbs for Blog Posts in multiple categories?
The site in question uses Wordpress. They have a Resources section that is broken into two categories (A or B). Underneath each of these categories is 5 or 6 subcategories. The structure looks like this: /p/main-category-a/subcategory/blog-post-name /p/main-category-b/subcategory/blog-post-name All posts have a main category, but other posts often have multiple subcategories while some posts also fall into both main categories. What would be the easiest or most effective way to auto-populate the breadcrumb based on from where the person reached the blog post? So for example, a way to set Home -> Main Category -> Subcategory 1 as the breadcrumb if they reach it from the Subcategory 1 landing page. Or is this not possible and we should just set the breadcrumb manually based on where we feel it best lives? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Alces0 -
Pages being flagged in Search Console as having a "no-index" tag, do not have a meta robots tag??
Hi, I am running a technical audit on a site which is causing me a few issues. The site is small and awkwardly built using lots of JS, animations and dynamic URL extensions (bit of a nightmare). I can see that it has only 5 pages being indexed in Google despite having over 25 pages submitted to Google via the sitemap in Search Console. The beta Search Console is telling me that there are 23 Urls marked with a 'noindex' tag, however when i go to view the page source and check the code of these pages, there are no meta robots tags at all - I have also checked the robots.txt file. Also, both Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl tools are failing to pick up these urls so i am a bit of a loss about how to find out whats going on. Inevitably i believe the creative agency who built the site had no idea about general website best practice, and that the dynamic url extensions may have something to do with the no-indexing. Any advice on this would be really appreciated. Are there any other ways of no-indexing pages which the dev / creative team might have implemented by accident? - What am i missing here? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
GWT Malware notification for meta noindex'ed pages ?
I was wondering if GWT will send me Malware notification for pages that are tagged with meta noindex ? EG: I have a site with pages like example.com/indexed/content-1.html
Technical SEO | | Saijo.George
example.com/indexed/content-2.html
example.com/indexed/content-3.html
....
example.com/not-indexed/content-1.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-2.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-3.html
.... Here all the pages like the ones below, are tagged with meta noindex and does not show up in search.
example.com/not-indexed/content-1.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-2.html
example.com/not-indexed/content-3.html Now one fine day example.com/not-indexed/content-2.html page on the site gets hacked and starts to serve malware, none of the other pages are affected .. Will GWT send me a warning for this ? What if the pages are blocked by Robots.txt instead of meta noindex ? Regard
Saijo UPDATE hope this helps someone else : https://plus.google.com/u/0/109548904802332365989/posts/4m17sUtPyUS0 -
Turn multiple Wordpress posts in to a PDF?
Has anyone any experience with creating a PDF from a bunch of posts from a wordpress site? I want to send some people a PDF of the latest posts within one of my blog categories. There is around 20 I want to pull in to a PDF Any ideas how to do this?
Technical SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Duplicated content on subcategory pages: how do I fix it?
Hello Everybody,
Technical SEO | | uMoR
I manage an e-commerce website and we have a duplicated content issue for subcategory. The scenario is like this: /category1/subcategory1
/category2/subcategory1
/category3/subcategory1 A single subcategory can fit multiple categories, so we have 3 different URL for the same subcategory with the same content (except of the navigation link). Which are the best practice to avoid this issue? Thank you!0 -
How damaging is duplicate content in a forum?
Hey all; I hunted around for this in previous questions in the Q&A and didn't see anything. I'm just coming back to SEO after a few years out of the field and am preparing recommendations for our web dev team. We use a custom-coded software for our forums, and it creates a giant swathe of duplicate content, as each post has its own link. For example: domain.com/forum/post_topic domain.com/forum/post_topic/post1 domain.com/forum/post_topic/post2 ...and so on. However, since every page of the forum defaults to showing 20 posts, that means that every single forum thread that's 20 posts long has 21 different pages with identical content. Now, our forum is all user-generated content and is not generally a source of much inbound traffic--with occasional exceptions--but I was curious if having a mess of duplicate content in our forums could damage our ability to rate well in a different directory of the site. I've heard that Panda is really cracking down on duplicate content, and last time I was current on SEO trends, rel="canonical" was the hot new thing that everyone was talking about, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Any guidance from the community would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | TheEnigmaticT0 -
How can i resolve Duplicate Page Content?
Hello, I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tools for my website AutoDreams.it i have found 159 duplicate page content. My problem is that this web site is about car adsso it is easy to create pages with duplicate content and also Car ads are placed byregistered users. How can i resolve this problem? Regards Francesco
Technical SEO | | francesco870