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There are over 40k pages of duplicate content that was flagged during an audit. It seems that most are due to the parameters in the URLs. The format is below:

http://example.org/site/UserLogin

http://example.org/site/UserLogin?NEXTURL=http://www.domain.org/folder1/page1

http://example.org/site/UserLogin?NEXTURL=http://www.domain.org/folder2/page2

http://example.org/site/UserLogin?NEXTURL=http://www.domain.org/folder3/page3

Would adding the parameter in Search Console fix those issues?

rel="canonical" is not an option due to the CMS the client is using.

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I would canoncilise the original page without the parameters to itself, which explains to google this is the original and you can ignore the rest.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://domain.org/site/UserLogin" />

We had to do this to a client website recently, took a few days to kick in but got rid of the duplicates.

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  • That was mu first choice as well. However, the CMS vendor that the client is using is unwilling to make the change in the header and does not allow us to implement canonical ourselfs. – dasickle Jun 24 '16 at 15:31
  • I guess it's not a wordpress CMS then? Otherwise I would suggest something like Yoast SEO – Switchfire Jun 24 '16 at 15:34
  • No, its some old school fundraising platform. – dasickle Jun 24 '16 at 15:35
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    If no one has access to the FTP client then the only way I can think of is getting the CMS platform devs to do something about it(which you've said they won't). Maybe this can shed some light, I've not tried it but it sounds like it could help - support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en – Switchfire Jun 24 '16 at 15:41
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Would adding the parameter in (google) Search Console fix those issues?

Even if it did, it wouldn't help 100% because there are other search engines I'm sure your client would want his website indexed in other search engines such as Bing and Yandex, and you may have to use their tools as well to sort out parameters.

Because pages only highlighting user login forms offer no value to casual guests, you're best to tell search engines not to index them by adding the following between the <head> and </head> tags of your HTML:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

If that is not possible in your setup, you can achieve the same effect via the following HTTP header tag:

X-Robots-Tag: noindex
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If the canonical tag in the header isn't an option, you have a few alternatives to avoid the impact of duplicate content:

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    So I would just add a parameter NEXTURL and select 'No. Does not effect page content' ? – dasickle Jun 24 '16 at 17:31

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