Thread

Hi all,

I am having some duplicate content issues and I would really appreciate some advice on how to correct this (if it is possible).

Put simply, there are dozens - possibly 100s - of URLs in Google that are not of my making, and they’re all duplicates of some areas of my site.

For example, there are all kinds of weird variations that are not standard URLs:

sitename.com/reviews/P410/
sitename.com/reviews/P630/
sitename.com/reviews/P870/
sitename.com/reviews/P830/

This is despite me not using /reviews/ as a main page. It’s simply used to as a page filter categories through, i.e.

sitename.com/reviews/category/category-name”.

Then I also have URLs such as the below listed in Google as well, and these are not standard to my site:

sitename.com/reviews/category/P207/
sitename.com/reviews/category/P176/
sitename.com/reviews/category/P821/

I also have broken links in Google, which are nothing to do with me:

E.g.: sitename.com/reviews/category/page-name-not-correct-...

And the list goes on. I can only assume people have in some cases linked to me incorrectly and it has set off a chain reaction due to the pagination set. I’ve removed the pagination code from /reviews and this helps a bit, but there’s a ton of duplicate content that I don’t even know where to begin sorting out! (In fact I’ve removed all pagination now but there’s still left overs in the search index).

I’m interested to know:

1) Has anyone else seen this before with ExpressionEngine?
2) Any ways to begin tackling the roblem?

I realise it’s a long one. Thanks for reading! 😊

They’re standard pagination URL’s. The first bunch /reviews/Pxxx come from pagination off your /reviews/index page, and /reviews/category/Pxxx from pagination in category pages.

In the strictest sense they are not duplicates, but simply paginated pages with various page view types. You’ll find the same thing in any site that has multiple section pages, especially large shopping cart sites where products spam multiple pages or have different ways of displaying content (eg by price, alphabetical etc), and so on.

If you didn’t want search engines to put much weight onto paginated pages then you could try adding rel=“nofollow” to pagination links, or by setting some canonical URL’s.

If the pages have been linked to, it may have caused some “incorrect” URL variations that have been crawled by a bot after following a wrongly structuted link, and your template set up may have allowed that to happen. If that is the case you can submit URL’s for removal to all the major engines, also look at doing a 301 redirect for incorrect links to the correct ones.

Do search bro.

This was discussed recently here: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/215722/