Duplicate content flagged thanks to indexing of category pages

[rhammett]

hi, I have noticed a change to the blog URL structure. Some now have ?= or ?category = that have no content on them. As a result the blank category page is being indexed by Google, and we are getting duplicate content because the category and the associated posts are being indexed.
Is there a way of setting a no index on the category pages?

[elixirgraphics]

Hi @rhammett —

I have not changed the URL structure within Alloy. It hasn’t changed since the initial release of v1.0.

[weeQtoo]

@rhammett

hi, I have noticed a change to the blog URL structure. Some now have ?= or ?category = that have no content on them. As a result the blank category page is being indexed by Google, and we are getting duplicate content because the category and the associated posts are being indexed.
Is there a way of setting a no index on the category pages?

This is an example of what we explained in our question - Will Alloy’s “Category Only” Option Cause Duplicate Content to be a Problem? Open to ideas.

[rhammett]

OK thanks - looks like I’ll have to do something in robots.txt to stop these pages being crawled

[DLH]

In Google Search Console, you can tell Google which query strings (that’s what ?= or ?category= are) to ignore when indexing. You should be able to find a number of articles and posts by searching for something like “preventing search indexes from including query strings”. Bing and others should have similar abilities.