Q2A produses too many pages with duplicate title

Question

Hi

1) A friend was checking the website with a SEO tool and found all these pages with the same title:

From what I understand, from each question answered, if you follow the [register] link, you end up in such a page.  Example:

This page: learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/910/written-vs-spoken-word

will lead to this page:  learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/register?to=910%2Fwritten-vs-spoken-word

2) All of the the following URLS display the same page:

learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/312/how-translate-the-phrase-those-love-will-sacrifice-into-greek?show=664

learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/312/how-translate-the-phrase-those-love-will-sacrifice-into-greek?show=555

learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/312/how-translate-the-phrase-those-love-will-sacrifice-into-greek?show=163

learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/312/how-translate-the-phrase-those-love-will-sacrifice-into-greek?fgsdrfgsdfg

learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/312/how-translate-the-phrase-those-love-will-sacrifi

I am still not sure if those pages are indexed in google or other search engines.  I am wondering though what is the best way to takle this? Maybe from robots.txt?

Comments

Let us know the tool you are using. It would be easier for the community members to look into the matter.

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Hi, try it with Screaming Frog:   https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

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Here is another problem:
The website is here:
learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/

However you can still go to the same page by putting this in the address bar:
learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/?sdkgsdiughsdliughsldkghlskdhgsldkfgsdfgsld

Where sdkgsdiughsdliughsldkghlskdhgsldkfgsdfgsld  is just a random string.

This creates infinite urls for the same page.

Answer 1

Serious Issue with Question 2 Answer. Someone needs to fix this at the earliest.

Please check at http://www.siteliner.com

Comments

I wonder if we can patch it through robots.txt, until the developer fixes this issue.

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The good news is that I do not see any issues reported in google WebMastertools.  

On the other hand, I am investigating an algorithmic penalty from google and everything is a suspect.

Answer 2

You can just install this plugin -- does a good job for default Q2A pages.

http://qcybb.com/question2answer-seo-meta-tags/

Comments

Hi

Seems very promising, I will try.

However, about the this issue:
?show=

James Spittal in June 12, 2013 at 4:23 am reported the same thing (in your comments section of http://qcybb.com/question2answer-seo-meta-tags/) and you told him there is no cure for this.

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This is not my plugin. But on my site I don't see duplicate content for '?show=' by Google. It works perfectly for me except for the blogs- which are not part of Q2A anyway.

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I caught the duplicate pages problem with the screaming-frog tool.  

Google in webmaster tools does not report these errors/problems, which is a good thing.

Answer 3

The above duplicate errors are not reported in Google webmastertools.  When I go to  WMT -> Crawl -> URL Parameters, I see a list, including the "show".

I think google is smart enough and through this list does not index the duplicate content:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080548

Answer 4

Until this is somehow fixed, I used this workaround.  In the robots.txt I inserted this line:

Disallow: /ask-greek/*?*

Answer 5

This should not be a problem because Q2A uses the rel=canonical tag which tells search engines the correct URL for a page. If you look in the source for the links you posted it has

<link rel="canonical" href="https://learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/312/how-translate-the-phrase-those-love-will-sacrifice-into-greek">

So all those URLs are fine. Incidentally, the situation you mention with random stuff in the URL like ?fgsdrfgsdfg is possible for every website so there's nothing Q2A can do about that.

You should check your site in Google Search Console (and Bing's version as well if you want). While tools like the ones you mentioned are useful it's best to go straight to the source. Google will tell you if you have duplicate pages in their eyes.

There is also a section for URL parameters where you can for example tell it to ignore certain parameters. Be careful though as some parameters like ?page= should not be ignored as they show different content.

Comments

Great answer, thank you Scott.

So I guess I need to reconsider this:
Disallow: /ask-greek/*?*

Could you elaborate on the ?page=   please?  Also this question, which I am sure it is related:
http://www.question2answer.org/qa/61116/what-is-the-show-url-parameter