Duplicate Title Tags

[KarenBM]

Having recently suffered a massive drop in indexed pages I have noticed 303 duplicate title tags reported in Google webmaster. Could someone tell me how to get rid of this duplication? Please see screenshots for examples. When I hover over the links I don't recognise what on earth the page is in one of them.

Thanks guys.

[peblaco]

It is picking up pages twice, .html links and cgi-bin script links which come from generated links or marketing lists. You can 1) use links starting http, 2) use canonical tags to point search engines to one URL, 3) put a rel="nofollow" on links to tell search engines not to index it.

Although webmaster tools will warn of duplicate title tags I do not expect that to be the cause of your drop in indexed pages, that could more likely be down to a lack of quality incoming links / good textual content or other poor seo signals.

[KarenBM]

Hi Peblaco. Thanks for your reply, much appreciated. I think the best (easiest?) option for me would be to add the rel="nofollow" code. Do I do that immidiately before the script? Is there a closing tag so that Google know to carry on after that? I don't want to cause even more problems.

Having just searched the forum I noticed someone mentioning adding a robot.txt file with specific instructions not to follow the cgi-bin, would that be better?

Although webmaster tools will warn of duplicate title tags I do not expect that to be the cause of your drop in indexed pages, that could more likely be down to a lack of quality incoming links / good textual content or other poor seo signals.

The site had been going along very nicely up to 1st April, so I don't think poor SEO is responsible. Since 1st April traffic to the site has crawled to a halt almost. The site has plenty of good quality incoming links, good textual contents (I think

1and1, who host the site, discontinued support for PHP versions 4 and 5.2 on the 1st April, could this be a factor?

Thanks again.

[peblaco]

It would be best to add nofollow to layouts which generate script links. Version 7 doesn't use PHP for pages. You could add a robots.txt to block the cgi-bin but nofollow would be better because robots blocked files can still show, see explanation here.

[KarenBM]

Thank you very much, you're astar. I added the drop-down menu's myself and have heavily modified the act_primary pages through the years thus very familiar with every bit of text in there Also the reason why I am unable to upgrade to more recent versions as an import seem impossible.

So do I need to put anything after the </script> to allow google to resume where it left off? is it simply:

rel="nofollow" <script> BLAH</script>

or do I put it inside the code, i.e. <script> rel="nofollow" BLAH</script>
?

Thank you

[peblaco]

An upgrade of a customised earlier version site is not impossible, I've done many over the years, you just have to know what to do. An automatic upgrade would probably leave a heavily customised layout looking messy and miss out some new code, but as long as you keep a copy of the old layout, make sure the new layout has the latest version code, remove the old version code and add any missing customisation it works just fine.

rel="nofollow" <script> BLAH</script>

No that's not right, when I said script links, I meant the cgi-bin search script links which the software uses to locate pages, not Javascripts. A nofollow tag has to go on a <a href> link tags for text links. More information here: Nofollow links

[KarenBM]

An upgrade of a customised earlier version site is not impossible, I've done many over the years, you just have to know what to do. An automatic upgrade would probably leave a heavily customised layout looking messy and miss out some new code, but as long as you keep a copy of the old layout, make sure the new layout has the latest version code, remove the old version code and add any missing customisation it works just fine.

It does look very messy indeed with the upgrade. I did ask Actinic (Sellerdeck) for help in importing the site but I think they were stumped too as the only response was "we'll get back to you"

No that's not right, when I said script links, I meant the cgi-bin search script links which the software uses to locate pages, not Javascripts. A nofollow tag has to go on a <a href> link tags for text links. More information here: Nofollow links

Where are the cgi-bin search script links? All I see is a function with appropriate parameters. Wait, hang on. Would it be here:

function ACT_DropListBox(ar)
{
var strIDs = '<SELECT SIZE="1" NAME="ACT_droplstbox" onChange="if(options[selectedIndex].value) window.location.href=(options[selectedIndex].value)">'
var sel = " SELECTED"

where would I put the no follow?

onChange="if(options[selectedIndex].value) rel="nofollow" window.location.href=(options[selectedIndex].value)">'

I really appreciate your help. Thank you.

[peblaco]

Links are not all in the primary layout, there are other layouts. The Javascript drop down list cannot have a nofollow in the traditional sense as it is not a <a href> link.

[Mike Hughes]

You could add a robots.txt to block the cgi-bin but nofollow would be better because robots blocked files can still show, see explanation here.

Using no-follows is no different than just blocking the spider in the robots.txt file and the robots.txt file is the easiest way to do this.

If you really want to ensure the page isn't indexed then you'll need to use a no-index on the cgi-bin pages themselves as explained in post you've linked to.

Mike

[peblaco]

Adding no-index on cgi-bin pages is more difficult in version 7 as it doesn't have different primary layouts or blockifs.