duplicate content issues.

Question

It seems that there are some problems with duplicate content that have not been addressed in q2a. For example on my site

http://mathhomeworkanswers.org

http://mathhomeworkanswers.org/questions

http://mathhomeworkanswers.org/activity

are essentially the same page. The only difference is that /questions and /activity include the additional page links to all of the questions at the bottom. This seems somewhat redundant and seems to be a duplicate content issue.

The same is true with all of the category pages.  They show up in questions and activity as well as directly off of the root

http://mathhomeworkanswers.org/algebra-1-answers

http://mathhomeworkanswers.org/activity/algebra-1-answers

http://mathhomeworkanswers.org/questions/algebra-1-answers

 

I personally would prefer that the root page and category pages automatically showed all of the additional question pages and elimiate the duplicate content

In other words show all activity on http://mathhomeworkanswers.org/

and get rid of /activity and /questions all together.

Same with the categories. I believe they should show the additional page buttons on the bottom if they exceed the length of the list and display only off of the root

http://mathhomeworkanswers.org/algebra-1-answers

and not

http://mathhomeworkanswers.org/activity/algebra-1-answers

http://mathhomeworkanswers.org/questions/algebra-1-answers

 

Any easy fix for this?

Comments

I really would like to know this solution. If anyone knows how to take care of this duplicated problems. please answer here

Answer 1

That is not really duplicate content, and you won't get penalised by search engines for it, if that was your concern. If anything, it aids their indexing of your site because you can show the top content in different forms (e.g. the first page of newest questions and the first page of active questions).

Although I didn't know that you could have all those sorting options in categories as well, that could be a little confusing for users to have so much.

You can remove menu items in the admin section, so you could turn off the "Activity" page. I don't think you can turn off "Questions" because that is the full paginated list, whereas the others are just a single page of recent questions.

Also, if you are really converned about Google indexing those pages, why not block them in robots.txt? Something like the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /activity/algebra-1-answers
Disallow: /questions/algebra-1-answers

And so on for all your categories.

Comments

The difference between tags and categories is that categories are supposed to be a low number of fixed topics. Having more than about 15 categories kind of defeats their purpose IMO. But I updated my answer with a solution to block pages getting indexed in robots.txt.

There are two things that could be improved:
1. Make the sidebar links clearer. When you are on the 'All activity' page for example, the sidebar should make it clear that clicking a category will show you all activity for that category rather than the regular view.
2. Put all the sorting options under one taxonomy. In other words, you'd have
/qa/questions/core, /qa/questions/core?sort=activity, /qa/questions/core?sort=votes

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Hi gidegreen,
I think that if they want to view the activity within a category, then they can click on the "main category page", which would be sorted by Activity. Send some URL variable that tells the page how to sort the data. Sort seems to be part of the db select anyway, so why not just send via URL?  It should work the same way with tags. Let's somebody wants to view a specific Tag, but in an All Activity page? Same sort of idea.

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I think Disgruntledgoat's second option would be best. just saw it before my last comment.

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Thanks for your responses. I'll think about the question for the next major release, though I'm not sure this is a burning issue for many people. Otherwise, there's always the option of implementing this via a plugin.