Duplicate tags problem with affiliate links

[polarcherry]

Hi

I've just looked on webmaster tools at one of my sites and noticed google is marking down duplicate title tags and meta tags for links to my pages via affiliates tracking codes.

I thought it should only mark duplicate tags for on your site direct, not an external inbound link going to your site?!

tracking style we use is: www . sitename.co.uk/hello?c=linktopage&s=affiliatecode&w=quickreveranc eforus

where as the actual page url on our site is: www . sitename.co.uk/competition/linktopage

help!


also - if you fix duplicate title tag and meta tag issues - how do you get google to amend its webmaster listing? do you have tell it to remove the old indexed pages? if so, how please.

[JohnW]

If you don't use disallow or noindex (or clever redirection)on these query string URLs each of them can get indexed under whatever URL is used in the link. So, you end up with duplicate pages, that naturally have duplicate titles etc.

Ways to remove these depend on a few things but depending on the rest of your setup you might want to 301 them to the canonical page.