Duplicate content in Category => Article

Hi all,

I've been reading this forum for a while, implemented some suggestions on my site that i started in an empty notepad this month. It already shows PR4 in the toolbar, that's really good for the first month, i guess. Thank you guys for that in some part ;-)

Well, i was wondering now if you guys could take a look at votetheday.com to help me a bit with a duplicate content issue.

There's a simple site structure like category->article where the home page is also treated as a category, except that it's displaying the most popular article (all sub-categories on the navigational menu are actually treated as normal 1st level categories in the site's directory structure).

The problem is that the category pages have no original content, they are showing the most popular article. So i made all the category pages "noindex, follow" to avoid them overtaking my real article pages, is this the right decision? However i have the same problem with my home page, it's contents are the same as contents of that most popular article page, so some of the most popular articles go to supplemental index after crawler finds the same text on my home page, and that is no good. It changes often. And I don't feel like noindex'ing my home page either. Don't know how to solve this.

I don't know if i explained that clearly, you can ask me if you need more info, but i really hope anyone has some experience with that. I would be glad if i could solve this without changing the contents/structure of the site much, however i could do that too if needed.

By the way, i have some mess with my title tags, they are also being duplicated in a few places. Starting to feel a bit lost in all this charade

Any fresh thoughts will be highly appreciated ;-)

I have met this case before using my blog what i do is that when I set it to display 5 post per category. And I still have less than 5 post in the category, I marked it with no index , follow tag. It works for me and does not have some ranking issues.

Now that I have more than 5 post, I remove the noindex tag and make the category pages indexable, as long as the title tag as shown in the category pages has hyperlinked pointing to your specific post, it will make those post pages appear more important than the category thus will decrease those duplicating filtering issues. Also this will ensure that Google will return the post pages in search results than the categories or archives.

Also since now I have more than 5 post and I am only using snippets (like "read more..."), it will make the category pages appear less duplicate to post page.

Ideally if you have more than a hundred posts, you can make those categories, archives and post pages purely indexable and it wont create duplicate filtering issues.

Like Google Matt Cutts Blog: www.mattcutts.com/blog, all are indexable and crawlable.

Not sure I fully understand but if I do you could consider Altering the category template making it different to the page template. Make the category templates unique. Or as suggested no index them.