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AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around the issue of duplicate tag pages appearing in Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). dmitry_fedyuk initially reported the problem, showing screenshots of the issue. vinothkannans suggested that the canonical tag could be the solution, but dmitry_fedyuk emphasized that this would not solve the problem, as he wants different pages from his site to appear in the search results.
The conversation continued with vinothkannans explaining that the canonical tag is intended to prevent duplicate search results. pfaffman asked about the Discourse version being used, and dmitry_fedyuk confirmed that he is using the latest version with the core tagging functionality.
cpradio suggested a related topic, but dmitry_fedyuk clarified that he wants the tags to be indexed, just not duplicated in the search results. sam questioned whether tags should be indexed at all, citing potential server resource waste. However, dmitry_fedyuk emphasized the importance of indexing tags for his site’s traffic.
The discussion continued with dmitry_fedyuk sharing data on the click-through rates (CTRs) for the top search results, highlighting the impact of duplicate pages on his site’s traffic. codinghorror expressed support for changes to address the issue, and neil committed a change to exclude duplicate tag pages from search results.
codinghorror further explained that categories are distinct and should not be duplicated, whereas tags can have thousands of duplicates, making them unsuitable for search indexing. The discussion concluded with neil committing the change to address the issue.
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<link rel="canonical" href="https://mage2.pro/tags/tax" />
both links having the above canonical URL. So I guess it is not a problem of Discourse.
It is a problem for my customers: when they search in Google, it would be better for them to see different pages from my site instead the same with duplicated content.
I mean one of the uses of canonical tag is to prevent duplicate search results. Your site having canonical tags on all tags related pages. That’s why I told it’s not the problem of Discourse.
I guess Google will take some time before excluding the URLs by canonical tag. Let’s wait to see what Discourse team thinks about it.
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What version of Discourse are you using? Do you really mean the tagging plugin? Tags we moved into core long ago.
I use the latest version and mean the tagging functionality in the core.
I have edited the title.
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Is this topic related?
https://meta.discourse.org/t/noindex-follow-in-tags-meta-robots-avoid-duplicate-content/56564
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No, I surely want the tags to be indexed, but do not want them to be included twice in the SERP.
I mentioned this before, @codinghorror should we even be allowing google to index the various “tag” pages, seems to me like a waste of server resources.
Thinking about it, I am not sure top or categories should be indexed as well, but as we creep along that way we reach the logical conclusion which is site maps.
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Indexing of the tags is very-very important to my traffic: as you can see, the tag pages are on the top of SERP. I just do not want a single tag to be included twice in SERP.
According to a 2013 study, the CTR’s for the first page goes as:
TOP 1: 32.5%
TOP 2: 17.6%
TOP 3: 11.4%
TOP 4: 8.1%
TOP 5: 6.1%
TOP 6: 4.4%
TOP 7: 3.5%
TOP 8: 3.1%
TOP 9: 2.6%
TOP 10: 2.4%
So when TOP 2 and TOP 5 shows the same page - I just loss my traffic for other pages.
What is why the @vinothkannans answer about canonical is not a solution.
And excluding tag pages from SERP would be crazy at all: a huge traffic loss.
Yes I mentioned this to @neil. I support these changes.
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I don’t follow why there is a page indexed with match_all_tags=true… @dmitry_fedyuk Did you figure out where Google is finding that link? It’s not a valid query parameter, so it’s thrown away. Is it from a plugin?
Ok we need to merge the discussion from the other topic then.
Google does seem to rank category pages (like /c/envato-announcements) very highly, and tag topic lists are basically the same thing. So… removing them would be a huge traffic loss or good for SEO? Or it depends and needs to be customizable?
I would say no. Categories are strong walls with distinct groupings, and there “should” never be more than, say 40 of them total. Furthermore there is zero duplication in categories. You are either in a category, or you are not.
There could be thousands of tags, and they duplicate each other! So tags should just be excluded.
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I committed the change today.
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