how to use a parameter to avoid duplicate content

[SeoDorje]

Hi all - i want to know that how to add a parameter for avoiding duplicate content and language for better google index .

I have a store created in prestashop and it shows two different url as one http://www.example.com/en and other http://www.example.com/fr but has the same content in it and by this google takes this as a duplicate content and penalize my site for that.

I want to know that how to avoid fr from being indexing by google by url parameter.
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:15 pm (utc) on Dec 30, 2012]
[edit reason] examplified domain and added paragraph break [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

Hi SeoDorje - What you are probably looking for is the robots meta tag. Use the tag in the head section of each the page you don't want indexed, with this syntax....

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

This is the equivalent of...

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

...which is what you want, but as "follow" is the default attribute, it's not necessary to use it. In the above form, the robots tag will keep the page from appearing in the index, but will allow it to accumulate and transmit PageRank.

Note that for your purposes, "nofollow" should not be used... as "nofollow" would prevent PageRank from flowing naturally through your site.

The tag is not case sensitive. A good outside reference for the meta robots tag is...

Using the robots meta tag
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

Something to note, btw... if your /fr and /en pages are in French and English, with sufficient text content in their respective languages to overcome the effects of your template boilerplate, they will not be considered duplicates.

[TheMadScientist]

Something to note, btw... if your /fr and /en pages are in French and English, with sufficient text content in their respective languages to overcome the effects of your template boilerplate, they will not be considered duplicates.

This ... And I'd definitely look into link relationship markup for linking between the two, because it helps machines 'get' why the link is there and what the relationship between the two pages is.

[gehrlekrona]

You need to go in to Google webmaster central and setup the parameters there. It seems to be working since I used parameters for sorting etc.

[aakk9999]

it shows two different url as one http://www.example.com/en and other http://www.example.com/fr

If URLs are as in OP's example, then lets be clear that 'en' and 'fr' are NOT parameters and as such they cannot be set up in WMT. For something to be a parameter in URL, the URL must have ?, the parameter must be after ? and the name of the parameter is to the left of the = sign.

If the content of two URLs given as OP's example is the same (that is, it is also in the same language), then either there is no equivalent content set up in CMS for alternate language so both languages pick up a "default" content, or there is a serious issue on how URL Rewrite is handled on the site.

If the content means the same, but is in different languages, then (as Robert said in his post above) this is not a duplicate content.

If you decide to go for noindex method, and if the content is taken from the same CMS source in admin, then after setting up noindex, you better check that the other URL is NOT noindexed by the virtue of taking the content from the same place in CMS.