Possible duplicate content issue []

#498469
  • Resolved Aliaksandr Tsykin

    3 years, 3 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Hello there,
    I have custom taxonomy with two categories types.
    Taxonomy: fotograf (Photographer)
    Categories: Miasta (Cities), Sesje (Photoshoots)

    Here’s a link to archive page (most important one for SEO): Astra Studio

    Question: Could there be potential duplicate content issue since each photographer’s page is present in many categories, especially in ‘sesje’.

    If so, then how could I avoid this issue?

    Note: this part of the website will be used to attract traffic with keywords like “photographer in Wroclaw”, “photographer Warsaw” etc. It’s quite important for us not to get into trouble with Google while also ensuring that we rank high on those keywords.

    Currently in order to avoid possible duplicate content issue all the pages are currently set to no-index.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Jaideep Asrani

    3 years, 3 months ago

    Hello,

    Thanks for contacting us and sorry for the inconvenience caused.

    I checked the pages and it doesn’t seem like your setup should cause a duplicate content issue. Only the preview of the photographer’s profiles are present on the archive and taxonomy pages and Google should be able to identify that these are archive pages not the actual content pages.

    And if you are concerned, you can follow this guide and run an audit: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-audit/duplicate-content/#close

    Hope that helps. Let us know if you need any other assistance.

    Aliaksandr Tsykin

    3 years, 3 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Thank you so much fo the reply.

    My concern is that the same photographer is present in many categories, for example in 2 cities or in 6 photoshoot categories.

    Therefore such profile will be present on 8 different archive pages.
    Could that lead to getting bad reputation on Google?

    Nigel

    3 years, 3 months ago

    Rank Math business

    Hello,

    Thank you for the clarification.

    Yes, category pages are normally set to noindex, as they have the same content as individual posts (photographer profiles in this case). However, a category page what most searchers would prefer to find in search results, so it may be better to set the pages to index. As a workaround you can manually set some categories to index and others to noindex depending on which have less overlap.

    Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have questions.

    Aliaksandr Tsykin

    3 years, 3 months ago

    Rank Math free

    Well, in our case category pages are the most important ones, since ppl that google “photographer wroclaw” probably wanna choose from the list instead of getting into specific photographer’s profile.

    In such case I have some possible scenarios:
    1) Set ‘index’ for both category pages and photographer’s pages [high risk of duplicate content issues]
    2) Same as #1 but some category pages will be set to no-index [lower risk than #1]
    3) Set ‘index’ for all category pages and ‘no-index’ for photographers pages [idk the risk in this case since photographers pages are somewhat different from their preview on category pages]

    Hence there are my questions:
    1) What is the worst scenario if Google will treat our category pages as duplicate content?
    2) What is the best option for us out of those three considering we want to attract as much traffic as possible with low risk of having duplicate content issues?
    3) How do I set specific category pages to ‘no-index’? I am not even sure that it’s possible with RankMath free since you set indexing rules for all of those pages at once 🤔

    Jaideep Asrani

    3 years, 3 months ago

    Hello,

    Having duplicate content on the site, especially on the archive pages isn’t going to affect the ranking overall. If you have the same content on multiple pages, Goole will only rank the one they find more useful for a search term in the SERPs. So you will still rank for the keyword but it might not be the exact page you want to rank for it.

    If you want to avoid having duplicate content, then you should set as index the page you think is going to attract more visitors.

    And please navigate to WP Dashboard > Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Categories and enable the Add SEO Controls option. Once done, you will able to access the meta box in the category editor and can set an individual category as Noindex from the Advanced tab of the meta box.

    Hope that helps. Let us know if you need any other assistance.

    RankBot

    3 years, 2 months ago

    Hello,

    Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.

    If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.

    Thank you.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

The ticket ‘Possible duplicate content issue []’ is closed to new replies.