Tricky Duplicate Content

Forum Moderators: phranque

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Tricky Duplicate Content

How do I remove them & then stop them from being indexed?

rj87uk

1:25 pm on Dec 31, 2009 (gmt 0)

I have an issue with several pages, I have a list of items in a category lets say its www.example.com/item-AREA.html now I have a drop down on this page that lets people order these items and it had its own page for it www.example.com/item-mostviewed-AREA.html.

Now the issue is there are four ways to order the list by meaning there are four pages for each item list page and they are all in the Google index meaning there is lots of duplicate content flying around which is a major bad point that I think is bringing down the rankings of the site so I need a solution to take out these duplicate content pages and make sure they don’t get indexed again.

The problem gets slightly more trickier by having many item list pages so I may be looking at 400+ pages of duplicate content.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I could do?

Regards,
RJ

Ps. Happy New Year & Hope everyone has a great start to 2010!

phranque

10:51 pm on Dec 31, 2009 (gmt 0)

i would try putting a noindex robots meta element on all but the canonical version of those pages.

rj87uk

2:11 pm on Jan 4, 2010 (gmt 0)

Thanks for your help phranque. I have put a noindex meta tag on the duplicate pages.

While I wait for these pages to be removed from the index I am wondering do you think having these duplicate pages in the index was harming my ranking in Google, MSN, Yahoo?

Do you think by adding in the META noindex tag to the duplicate pages will increase my ranking?