Duplicated content with noindex in robots.txt could harm SEO?

Sebastian Velandia · Aug 23, 2020

I have some pages with duplicated content in my website, these pages have no-index specified in the metatags and also I have Disallow in robots.txt for these pages...

There's just 2 pages of my site with duplicated content, I wonder if this could harm my SEO and affect my domain?

My guess is that if I have noindex for these pages Google won't crawl it, so there should not be any problem.

GrizzlyBeardMan · Aug 24, 2020

Why do you want to have these two pages with mostly the same content?

Either way you can use a canonical tag to point from one of those pages to the other one indicating the main version.

Sebastian Velandia said:
My guess is that if I have noindex for these pages Google won't crawl it, so there should not be any problem.

Google will still crawl the page even if it's noindex. It just tells what to do with the page. Also, if you have a noindex tag, canonical tag or anything else that you have changed for a page, you should not disallow the page from crawling. Google has to be able to crawl that page to see tags you've added.

Sebastian Velandia · Aug 24, 2020

GrizzlyBeardMan said:
Why do you want to have these two pages with mostly the same content?

Either way you can use a canonical tag to point from one of those pages to the other one indicating the main version.

Google will still crawl the page even if it's noindex. It just tells what to do with the page. Also, if you have a noindex tag, canonical tag or anything else that you have changed for a page, you should not disallow the page from crawling. Google has to be able to crawl that page to see tags you've added.

Well I actually meant, that those two pages were copied from another website, that's what I meant. So it will harm my domain authority the same way, right?

I didn't understand the last part, I actually don't want Google to crawl those pages, I mean, I want Google to totally ignore those two pages, like if they never existed. I only use those pages in my emailmarketing strategy.

rafark · Aug 25, 2020

Sebastian Velandia said:
I have some pages with duplicated content in my website, these pages have no-index specified in the metatags and also I have Disallow in robots.txt for these pages...

There's just 2 pages of my site with duplicated content, I wonder if this could harm my SEO and affect my domain?

My guess is that if I have noindex for these pages Google won't crawl it, so there should not be any problem.

Google will most likely crawl it but wont index it (at least won’t show publicly as indexed).

You should add a canonical tag to those pages and call it a day. That’s the reason the canonical tag was introduced.

GoogleDude · Aug 25, 2020

yeah if you've disabled the crawler it won harm seo

Duplicated content with noindex in robots.txt could harm SEO?

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