• Registered: 2010-01-04
  • Posts: 16
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Topic: Remedy for Duplicate Meta Tags in Contact and Tell a Friend?

I have been getting the same description and title meta tags in "listing detail","contact advertiser"and "tell a friend" pages of a single listing. this has led to multiple duplicate metas which google has highlighted in their reports in Google Webmaster and affecting my ranking.

What is the way to tell Google not to index all results of  ' tell a friend link' and 'contact advertiser' ?
Can we put a noindex somewhere in the codes ?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Bally

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  • AlexG
  • AlexG
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  • From: www.deltamods.com
  • Registered: 2004-05-14
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Re: Remedy for Duplicate Meta Tags in Contact and Tell a Friend?

You may add robots.txt file to your top level folder of PHP Classifieds and say there which pages should not be crawled by search engine bots.

AlexG's Website

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  • Registered: 2010-01-04
  • Posts: 16
  • User Karma: 1

Re: Remedy for Duplicate Meta Tags in Contact and Tell a Friend?

Thank you for the suggestion. Can you please tell me the exact content of that file to ignore all links with 'tell a friend', 'print' and 'contact'. I have a lot of ads and it will be a pain to enter them individually.

What is the exact syntax in the robots.txt file?

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  • AndyC
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  • Registered: 2004-10-17
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Re: Remedy for Duplicate Meta Tags in Contact and Tell a Friend?

You could use:

Disallow: /*&

which blocks any url with a '&' in it, such as /detail.php?id=****&tellafriend=1

AndyC

AndyC's Website

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  • Registered: 2010-01-04
  • Posts: 16
  • User Karma: 1

Re: Remedy for Duplicate Meta Tags in Contact and Tell a Friend?

Thank you Andy for the prompt reply and the solution offered. That takes care of the duplicates effectively for good. But  since I have created pages with search results based on pre-determined criterea, that contains the '&' sign in the URL the same would be excluded in indexing.

The google solution which works to block those pages only, the content of the robots.txt will be ;

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*tellafriend=1$
Disallow: /*contact=1$
Disallow: /*print=1$

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