Duplicate Content

[khod]

Hello,

I have Version 6.0 Professional.

On my website, I have product broken up by category. One category (Workstations, for example) has many of the same products as another category (Tables, for example) but the products listed in each category will not match up 100% with any other categories.

If a product appears in multiple categories, then my URLs then appear as such:

http://localhost/thehub/product-view.php?category=tables-186&series=agility-table-500
http://localhost/thehub/product-view.php?category=workstations-desks-182&series=agility-table-500

You can see that the product that is being displayed is the same, but the URL is a little bit different (category variable) and the <title> of the page will be a little different as well. Otherwise, identical pages.

How can I prevent multiple links from showing up when a user searches for "Agility Tables"?

I've tried using the "View or delete pages from existing index" tool, but it will not let me sort alphabetically (fastest way by far to find these repeats) and so will not work for my purposes.

I have turned on the "Duplicate page detection", but it is not catching these types of 99.9% duplications.

Thanks for your help!
khod

[Ray]

"Duplicate page detection" won't work by default here because your <title> tag is actually different, so the overall HTML is decidedly different.

However, this feature will ignore sections of the page marked with <!--ZOOMSTOP--> and <!--ZOOMRESTART-->. Please see this FAQ for more information on this feature:
Q. How do I prevent parts of my webpage from being indexed (eg. exclude navigation menus, or page footers)?

So if you wrap your title tag as so,

<!--ZOOMSTOP-->
<title> my page title</title>
<!--ZOOMRESTART-->

Then it will ignore this and if the rest of the page is 100% identical, it will skip the duplicate pages.

However, doing this will also exclude the title tags from being indexed. Which means they won't show up in the search results. To get around this, you might want to use the ZOOMTITLE meta tag to specify a title for use in Zoom specifically. This can be the same between the two pages (unlike the normal title tag).

Hope that helps.