Duplicate pages and noindex

[johnn]

In a website, if I have 2 different links and when I click each link, the same page is displayed. If I put noindex in one link and not in the other, does Google still index this page?

[James]

Yes, I believe so. If it weren't, it'd be too easy to sabotage people's rankings.

[r2d2]

When you say 'different links', do you mean the URLs are different?

[johnn]

Yes. For example, an article is written by 2 authors, and it may have two urls
like:

abc.com?id=123&author=au1
abc.com?id=123&author=au2

It will display same page but different urls. That's the problem!!!


This can also happen in case when a product belongs to 2 different categories!! I'm sure some people here had this before.

[r2d2]

Are you really using 'id' as a querystring variable? If so, neither is likely to get indexed as the SE will think the id is a sessionid.

Other than that, I would probably look at altering the indexing system so that an article can only be accessed via one URL. Eg, do you really need to pass the author_id in using a querystring, if you are also passing in the article id?

E.g. : article.php?article=123

Perhaps also look at using SEO friendly URLs (http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/search_engine_friendly_urls/).

[James]

Having 2 pages with the same content will mean they're still 2 different pages in the eyes of SEs; therefore, you must noindex both, unless that's in a meta tag in the header of both.

[r2d2]

Why would you want to noindex both? With the intention of neither getting indexed?

That wouldnt stop people linking to either from another site on the web. And they probably wouldnt bother with noindex. So perhaps best to cure this problem at the root.

[johnn]

[QUOTE=r2d2]
E.g. : article.php?article=123
QUOTE]

Yes, it looks good, but say both authors are famous, people may want to enter in search engines one of the author's names together with an article's title, that why I want to pass author's name. That's could also happen when a product belongs to two very popular categories that people may use one of them.

That's why in this case, I have to sacrifice one of them with 'noindex' to prevent duplicates.

About meta tags, since these are dynamic pages, I can easily put particular author name in meta title, meta description, meta keywords, but I think SEs is more concern with majority content of body to determine duplicates.

[Blue Cat Buxton]

If you are no indexing one of the pages then that author wont get any benefit of having their name passed anyway?

[johnn]

True, but that author may get benefit from other articles. I hope that's the way it is. If you think "remove that author from url", then a page still has 2 different urls.