Database sites and duplicate content risks

pataya · 05-17-2006, 02:32 AM

Hi everyone,

I have a data base driven joomla website with 772 categories, most of them still empty because the site is new...

I would like Google to only show content pages, for example, I would want this page to be crawled:

http://example.com/marketing/merchan...rchandise.html

but not these pages:

http://example.com/marketing/merchandising/
http://example.com/marketing/

The above pages are empty, just a directory listing and links, would Google see that as duplicate content or will they just quickly crawl them until getting to my content items?

I put very important in the subject field because doing the wrong thing could easily get my banned...

Thanks,
Bruno

Johan007 · 05-17-2006, 04:04 AM

What your doing is fine Bruno as long as you dont link to the root the SE cant spider it. I dont see it as dupe content. You could always send the root to a 404 page.

pataya · 05-17-2006, 05:38 AM

Hi John,

Thanks for the quick reply. However, I'm using an automatic XML site map generator, and it DOES include all the empty pages...close to 700 of them, I was thinking maybe of turning off "show empty categories", that might be the best bet.

Thanks

Johan007 · 05-17-2006, 07:26 AM

Simply tern off your XML site map generator or just list the homepage. You ranking and website indexing should not be effected or manually update your robot.txt with these pages will overwrite the sitemap.