SEO, ordering and duplication of content

Posted by piquadrat on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by piquadrat
Published on 2010-05-16T10:07:02Z Indexed on 2010/05/16 10:10 UTC
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I run a specialized news site and am trying to apply a little bit of SEO sauce to it. One of the most important things I hear is to avoid duplication of content. I've covered all the basics but I'm stuck with ordering of content.

As an example, the archive of the site is orderable by date, views, and rating. Since we don't have that many news items, an archive page for a particular day has usually only a couple of items, so the following URLs all have the same content, albeit in different ordering:

  • /news/archive/2010/05/16/
  • /news/archive/2010/05/16/?o=views
  • /news/archive/2010/05/16/?o=rating

Do search machines penalize this particular kind of duplication of content? And if yes, what's the best way to avoid said penalty? <link rel="canonical" />? Tell Google & Co. to ingore the o parameter? Marking the ordering links with nofollow? Only allow the indexation of the date-ordered archive sites through robots.txt (not sure if this is even possible)?

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