Ezoic must add "noindex" to duplicate pages that it creates
Ezoic created over 40 pages of extra (dynamic) pages or new URLs starting with “?” on my site. These URL extensions included:
?PageSpeed=noscript
?ModPagespeed=noscript
?vm=r
?sms_ss=facebook
I discovered these extra pages in Google Webmasters since they are listed in HTML Improvements as Duplicate Titles and Duplicate Meta Tags. Google reduces SERP for duplicates, and the penalty can cause 2-10 times reduction in traffic….
My recent attempts to add the “canonical” tag did not make any difference. All these extra pages are still indexed by Google.
I think that if this is a necessity (to create extra pages), then Ezoic must add “noindex” tag for all extra pages.
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It's important to understand that Ezoic doesn't "create duplicate pages". The pages referred to in this discussion are simply pages with querystrings on them. For example, sms_ss=facebook is likely appended by some app (maybe facebook?) There is no technically feasible way for us to determine which parameters are valid and should be indexed and which should not.
Of course, you are in full control of your website's content. If you would like to specify noindex for certain parameters, you are able to do that.
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Anonymous commented
Thanks, I added "canonical" over a week ago.
The Google bot crawled all original and extra pages again 2-3 times since then, indexed them all again, and extra pages with "?" are still shown as meta and title duplicates in Webmasters. -
This is handled through the use of a canonical meta tag. For example, if you look at the source of this url: http://www.normalbreathing.com/?PageSpeed=noscript -- you'll see the canonical meta tag of: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.normalbreathing.com/">
Some good reading on the topic here:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/myths-about-duplicate-content/