Mobile app version of vmapp.org
Login or Join
YK1175434

: Do sort and page parameters count as duplicate content? I'm running into duplicate content warnings on my site. I have product overview pages which can be sorted on price, popularity and more.

@YK1175434

Posted in: #DuplicateContent #Google #GoogleIndex

I'm running into duplicate content warnings on my site. I have product overview pages which can be sorted on price, popularity and more.
I end up with URLs like these:
example.com/products?sort=popular%20asc www.example.com/products?sort=popular%20desc example.com/products?sort=price%20desc www.example.com/products?sort=price%20asc

and with paging I get URLs like:
example.com/products?sort=popular%20asc&page=3&rows=10 www.example.com/products?page=6&rows=20

Now, the displayed products are obviously different, but these products can all be accessed via example.com/products too and then by paging through them.

Would any of these URL's be considered duplicate content by Google?
And If so, how would I prevent this from being marked as such? I've read about the canonical tag but am not sure if it's applicable here and if so, how it should be applied.

10.01% popularity Vote Up Vote Down


Login to follow query

More posts by @YK1175434

1 Comments

Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best

 

@Angela700

For all the URLs where the page and rows define the URL such as this one:
example.com/products?sort=popular%20asc&page=3&rows=10

The easy way out is to add:

<link rel="canonical" href="url">


but replace "url" with the URL to the first page and the default row count. In your case, this can be:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/products?sort=popular%20asc&page=1&rows=10">


Just don't place the above tag on the URL it points to or you'll confuse google like crazy. As an extra protection, you can combine the link tag mentioned above with:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">


That way, other search engines (particularly ones that don't understand rel=canonical) won't think you're trying to index duplicate content.

As for these urls:
example.com/products?sort=popular%20asc www.example.com/products?sort=popular%20desc


Pick one as the default url everyone will go to and include a rel=canonical tag as described above to the remaining of the two url's above and set href to the default URL.

The only other option is to make content in all pages super unique.

Having paragraphs of similar content with the only unique text being something like "entries are sorted in alphabetical order" will make your page 2% unique if you're lucky and I doubt that would be unique enough to disqualify from duplicate content.

10% popularity Vote Up Vote Down


Back to top | Use Dark Theme