# Negative SEO because of too much category pages getting indexed
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/negative-seo-because-of-too-much-category-pages-getting-indexed/65420
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [6월 30, 2017, 7:58오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/negative-seo-because-of-too-much-category-pages-getting-indexed/65420 "2017-06-30T19:58:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
If you look for total category pages indexed of [meta.discourse.org](http://meta.discourse.org) with following query in google
`site:meta.discourse.org/c/`
you will find 1670 pages index. Similarly i have a discourse site with 50 categories
while here more than 23 thousand pages are indexed under category. ( **A very very dangerous signal for seo because of content duplicacy** )
It should be fixed otherwise google will penalise a discourse website rankings.
Look at the following screenshot how duplicate pages are created and indexed.
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I tried to write about this earlier. This is an example:
[https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-for-discourse-not-working-properly/60709/5?u=stranik](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-for-discourse-not-working-properly/60709/5)
Possible
```
Disallow: /latest?exclude_*
Disallow: /*?no_subcategories=*
```
I think it is more correct to look directly into the search index. I don’t know if there is such a mechanism in the Google search engine. In Yandex there is a detailed report: duplicates, poor content, all types of errors, are excluded and the included page, graphics crawls, etc. According to the results, a lot of duplicate pages.
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I think you may be expecting the Google search modifier to to behave in a way it doesn’t.
[Refine Google searches - Google Search Help](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433)
> Search for a specific site
> Put “site:” in front of a site or domain. For example, site:youtube.com or site:.gov.
Do you have a Google reference that indicates URLs with sub-folders limits results to only those folders?
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The issue is these weirdo querystrings.. where is this crap coming from?
`page` I can certainly understand, but…
`no_subcategories`?
`slow_platfom`?
`per_page`?
wtf?
Just combining those three plus `page`, that’s
16 categories \* 4 \* 3 \* 2 = 384
384 category “pages”
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I think I see the problem, and we need to fix it ASAP
`https://meta.discourse.org/c/plugin?no_subcategories=false&page=2&slow_platform=20`
This page _must_ have a canonical meta-tag like so:
``
Can you take this @techapj please? the meta-tag should be served to all clients including Google crawler.
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We used to include canonical meta tag on `/c/plugin ` page but (I think) this was regressed 4 months ago when we introduced “Default Topic List” category setting.
This should now be fixed, and a test case is added to prevent future regression.
[https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/72c92b0f4e2c324a9902613c9464fc45bf7fc09b](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/72c92b0f4e2c324a9902613c9464fc45bf7fc09b)
Now all the category pages should have canonical meta tag except the Top category page (`/c/plugin/l/top`).
---