Thread

After looking through an SEO profile of our site, I see we have thousands of pages in our news and blog area that look like the attached image.

They’re showing up as duplicate Titles in our site audit.

http://theplatform.com/about/news_and_events/p10/ shows the exact same content as http://theplatform.com/about/news_and_events/p10/p10/p10/

We’re getting a very similar situation with our blog and also seeing those show up in our duplicate content report.  I can’t imagine any of this is good for our ranking on the SERP.

What are you using for the audit?  Unless they can actually be crawled, there’s not much of an SEO issue since they’ll never actually be seen by the search engines.  I’d suggest something like http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/sitemap-module to automatically create the sitemap and tell Google/Bing/Yahoo Webmaster Tools to use it.  I’ve found it worth the price just for the time saved.

OH!  And what you NEED to do, in case they are getting seen by the search engines, is setting the canonical URL in the metatags.

<link rel='canonical' href='http://www.abc.com/p10' />

How you get it to output the canonical url is up to you. 

This way works for me, but {canonical_url} may be a Structure tag or something.

<link rel='canonical' href='{canonical_url}' />

That will tell search engines that even if it’s getting http://www.abc.com/p10/p10/p10/p10/ etc, that the proper URL to use is the one mentioned, and it won’t penalize you for duplicate content.

Also useful if you use a site like mine that uses hashtags or something in the url.  So http://www.abc.com/p10#contentA and http://www.abc.com/p10#contentB are both considered to be http://www.abc.com/p10 and not separate pages.

Useful add-on is SEO Lite (http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/seolite) and you can just put the canonical tag in its template.

SEOprofiler

We have a sitemap on GWT under the Crawl section that has 326 indexed pages but then when I look at the Index Status it is showing 109,581.  That’s what worries me is all of those.

I realize I can use canonical but I have no idea how to set that up for these dynamically created pagination files.  Plus that doesn’t address the root problem.  Why do we have all of these showing up and pointing to the same information?  How can I prevent this?

Most likely you have 1 or more relative links that are creating duplicate content. So on your http://theplatform.com/about/news_and_events/p10 page you might have a relative link to ‘p10’ that creates http://theplatform.com/about/news_and_events/p10/p10 page and so on.

I would check the front end carefully to track down where the duplicate page links are being generated. On a quick look on the page you gave, the page number links are probably incorrect. For example, to go to page 2 the link is ..../p10/p10 and for page 3 it’s .../p10/p20 . I’d start right there…