Daily Blog Archives and Duplicate Content

Posted by nemmy on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by nemmy
Published on 2013-06-27T02:05:52Z Indexed on 2013/06/27 4:31 UTC
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A few weeks back I realised that my blog software was creating daily post archives. Which basically resulted in duplicate content especially if I only had one post a day. The situation is something like this:

www.sitename.com/blog/archives/2013/06/01 - daily archive for 1 June 2013

www.sitename.com/blog/archives/2013/06/my-post-name.html

So, here we have two pages that are basically identical except the daily archive has some meaningless title like "Daily Archive for 1 June 2003". And I have no control over which content Google decides is the primary content. It's quite possible (and likely) that the daily archive could be the "primary" content and the actual post itself the "duplicate".

Once I realised it was doing this I modified the daily archive template to include

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Here we are a few weeks later and I still see some daily archives coming up in Google search results. I realise some of those deep pages might not be crawled yet but I am worried that the original post (which should be the PRIMARY content) has been marked duplicate content by Google. Now I've no indexed the daily archives I might end up with no indexed content AND the original articles still flagged as duplicates. And nothing will show up in search at all.

Have I screwed myself here or is there a way out?

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