Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate Content | eBay
-
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform.
I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay?
Update:
I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical
So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content.
The question is now: should I add it or not?
UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting.
Anyone else have feedback?
-
Well,
I have client account examined here on MOZ. He's got huge duplicated content and it definitely sounds to me like it is duplicating the content from the site to Ebay.
I'll post back about that, but definitly something to consider. I guess if Google has to choose beetween a site and Ebay... it is going to be tough to fight for SERPS against Ebay.
-
eBay does not care about duplicate content unless copyright involves. Great image and great price is the ebay to sell on ebay.
-
Agree with Stephan here - eBay's extremely unlikely to give you control over the rel=canonical on their product pages, but generally, the content duplication by having the product info on their site shouldn't harm you.
If you're really worried, provide more detail/depth/content on your own site than what you do on eBay, and possibly consider having different title/product name conventions. There's lots of good ways to describe the same product.
-
You can have canonical from one domain to another.
I am talking about have the ability to actually control eBay's meta data at the canonical level. They already have canonical tags going back to their own pages and I doubt they would give you control over it. Again, I am not 100% sure but I would be shocked if they gave you control of that field. eBay has its own SEO concerns so I image they would retain control of that field.
I just don't consider a product page on eBay to be a duplicate of a product page on a third party site even if the site were feeding the data to eBay. Your site and eBay are 2 totally separate entities and I don't think these would be considered duplicate pages.
-
yea me too: Listening to Matt Cutts here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/ If you want to fast forward to: 1:30 and it seems to me that hes saying that you can have a canonical from what I understand: anywhere. Hearing that and wondering how the search engines REALLY interpret iframes ( as they want to read a site more like a human ) how will they handle the canonical.
Sure not 100% of the site actually us a duplicate but the main stuff is. It makes me wonder. I'll really know if I see a backlink from eBay in OSE.
( not saying that that is the goal but the content is ours and if the shoe was on the other foot and we getting penalized..) -
I am not sure you can control the canonical tag of an eBay page. I think eBay will have the main control... you can maybe add it to the iFrame but I think eBay's headers will be the ones that have dominance.
I also don't think having eBay product pages would be considered duplicate content. We have numerous product feeds going to third party shopping sites and I don't consider this to be duplicate content at all.
However, I am only slightly familiar with eBay. It will be interesting to see other answers on the subject.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Same product in different categories and duplicate content issues
Hi,I have some questions related to duplicate content on e-commerce websites. 1)If a single product goes to multiple categories (eg. A black elegant dress could be listed in two categories like "black dresses" and "elegant dresses") is it considered duplicate content even if the product url is unique? e.g www.website.com/black-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/elegant-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/black-elegant-dress unique url > this is the way my products urls look like Does google perceive this as duplicated content? The path to the content is only one, so it shouldn't be seen as duplicated content, though the product is repeated in different categories.This is the most important concern I actually have. It is a small thing but if I set this wrong all website would be affected and thus penalised, so I need to know how I can handle it. 2- I am using wordpress + woocommerce. The website is built with categories and subcategories. When I create a product in the product page backend is it advisable to select just the lowest subcategory or is it better to select both main category and subcategory in which the product belongs? I usually select the subcategory alone. Looking forward to your reply and suggestions. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cinzia091 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Artist Bios on Multiple Pages: Duplicate Content or not?
I am currently working on an eComm site for a company that sells art prints. On each print's page, there is a bio about the artist followed by a couple of paragraphs about the print. My concern is that some artists have hundreds of prints on this site, and the bio is reprinted on every page,which makes sense from a usability standpoint, but I am concerned that it will trigger a duplicate content penalty from Google. Some people are trying to convince me that Google won't penalize for this content, since the intent is not to game the SERPs. However, I'm not confident that this isn't being penalized already, or that it won't be in the near future. Because it is just a section of text that is duplicated, but the rest of the text on each page is original, I can't use the rel=canonical tag. I've thought about putting each artist bio into a graphic, but that is a huge undertaking, and not the most elegant solution. Could I put the bio on a separate page with only the artist's info and then place that data on each print page using an <iframe>and then put a noindex,nofollow in the robots.txt file?</p> <p>Is there a better solution? Is this effort even necessary?</p> <p>Thoughts?</p></iframe>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
How get rid of duplicate content, titles, etc on php cartweaver site?
my website http://www.bartramgallery.com was created using php and cartweaver 2.0 about five years ago by a web developer. I was really happy with the results of the design was inspired to get into web development and have been studying ever since. My biggest problem at this time is that I am not knowledgable with php and the cartweaver product but am learning as I read more. The issue is that seomoz tools are reporting tons of duplicate content and duplicate title pages etc. This is likely from the dynamic urls and same pages with secondary results etc. I just made a new sitemap with auditmypc I think it was called in an attempt to get rid of all the duplicate page titles but is that going to solve anything or do I need to find another way to configure the site? There are many pages with the same content competing for page rank and it is a bit frustrating to say the least. If anyone has any advice it would be greatly appreciated even pointing me in the right direction. Thank you, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WSOT0
