search engine duplicate meta description title tags i.e. pagename?page=

By Naturalist on 31 Mar 2010 at 10:59 UTC

What is the best way to handle this. Getting dupes for meta description and title tags in Google webmaster tools. Why is there no / between page name and ?order= pagename?order=name&sort=asc What I think is happening even though I have */?page=/ or /*/?page=/ or ?page= or *?page= in robots.txt is that because of the absence of the slash it is still getting indexed. I have pathauto and global redirect also. I know you Drupal Wizards know how I can fix this. Please help. Thanks in advance.

Comments

I am also interested in this.

Jhun Vert commented 4 April 2010 at 13:11

I am also interested in this. I have many pages reported with up to 30 duplicate title tags in webmaster tools. Global redirects do not handle the redirection of these pages.

having the same issue here.

danyaeldemonic commented 23 March 2011 at 15:49

having the same issue here. I'm on Drupal 6.2. I have multiple mods in the site, but I've noticed this problem since the start of my site with no special mods.
I'm also noticing that its pulling up nodes and content pages that don't exist on my site

Inject Page Number

Simon Naude commented 2 April 2012 at 11:35

I experienced the same problem with a client's site. The fix is easy ; just write some code to pull the page number out of $_GET['page'] and inject
" (Page {$_GET['page']})" into the end (or wherever) of your meta description tag :

  if( isset($_GET['page']) ) {
    drupal_set_head( "<meta name=\"description\" content=\"$meta_content  (Page {$_GET['page']})\" />" ) ;
  }

Isn't that

Ayesh commented 2 April 2012 at 12:25

Isn't that drupal_set_html_head() ?
Also, this will duplicate metatags from Nodewords or whatever module I think.

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hack for the real issue, no?

Elijah Lynn

Portland, Oregon

commented 27 April 2012 at 20:17

Don't you think that is kind of a hack? The real issue is that Google is trying to tell us that that want a unique and useful meta description for each page. I suspect they would easily be able to catch on to just a minor change on all of them like that. If this has the placebo effect by you not seeing this in the Google Webmaster tools anymore then fair enough, but just remember that it may come back to bite you.

For everyone who reads this, I would not recommend the above solution to get around this. The real solution would be to actually have a real meta description for each page which I am on the search for right now as to either enable this at the user level or to generate properly and intelligently as I just came across this in the Google Webmaster tools myself. My other thought is that if you don't want to generate a useful meta description then just leave it out.

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Subscribing I have the same

Oleg commented 11 April 2012 at 18:16

Subscribing

I have the same issue. With just about 60 articles on the site I get about 700 errors reported by search engines.

Same issue here

James A commented 4 October 2012 at 12:09

I'm also getting the same issue so any help would be appreciated. Basically Google has simply added ?page=X%2CY to tones of my pages and because drupal just shows the page defined in the main page root Google counts it as a duplicate.

One thing I have done to try and stop this is switched on 'Add Canonical Link' under Global Redirect which, if I understand it correctly, should identify the page that is being referred to by inserting
into the page. In this way Google knows whether or not to see the page being indexed as a new page or simply an pointer to an existing one, or at least that's what I believe it does.

Dont use Canconical under Global Redirect

James A commented 5 October 2012 at 22:44

Having tried enabling Canconical under Global Redirect and then checking the results I found Drupal 7 already does it and by enabling it under Global Redirect you get it twice, pointing to different links on occasion. Global redirect looked better at first but I then discovered it simply put in the url, so in my case if you entered an ?page=0%2C1 it would tack this onto the end of the url which is what I wanted to avoid. Thankfully normal drupal doesn't do this, but it doesn't help with actual pagers either.

Guess you can't have everything. If I knew why Google was adding the ?page=0%2C1 etc then maybe I could do something more about it. Is it simply Ajax pagers?