Duplicate Content and Duplicate Titles

Question

I used moz.com to analyze my site and got a report that I had almost 5,000 duplicate URLs and almost 5,000 duuplicate titles.   The vast majority were from pages on the Q2A pages.

There have been 3,440 questions asked.

I am concerned about this because the site may incur a Google penalty.

Here is a small sample:

Example of Duplicate Content (There are approximately 5,000 duplicate content URLs)   I note that the ending text (following the "?") is unique so they must be using a % factor to say there is duplicate content,:

Register as a new user - Bankruptcy Canada Q&A
http://www.bankruptcycanada.com/ask-a-trustee/register?
to=292%2Freading-done-have-credit-ratingreestablished-about-years%3Fshow%3D293

Register as a new user - Bankruptcy Canada Q&A
http://www.bankruptcycanada.com/ask-a-trustee/register?
to=2927%2Fconsumer-proposal-are-rrspsprotected-you-have-to-cash-them

Register as a new user - Bankruptcy Canada Q&A
http://www.bankruptcycanada.com/ask-a-trustee/register?
to=2931%2Fshe-has-died-what-happens-tothe-proposal

 

Example of Duplicate Titles (There are approximately 5,000 duplicate titles):

 

Ask a question - Bankruptcy Canada Q&A
http://www.bankruptcycanada.com/ask-a-trustee/ask

Ask a question - Bankruptcy Canada Q&A
http://www.bankruptcycanada.com/ask-a-trustee/ask?cat=1

Ask a question - Bankruptcy Canada Q&A
http://www.bankruptcycanada.com/ask-a-trustee/ask?cat=10

 

Help please,

Earl Sands

Answer 1

I believe the issue goes beyond Q2A. Basically, you need to tell the search engines spiders/crawlers not to index the /ask and /register urls. It doesn't make any sense at all to do that as they don't have any content.

You can do that with a robots.txt file. More info here:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
• http://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449