I try to apply best duplicate content practices, but my rankings drop!
-
Hey,
An audit of a client's site revealed that due to their shopping cart, all their product pages were being duplicated.
http://www.domain.com.au/digital-inverter-generator-3300w/
and
http://www.domain.com.au/shop/digital-inverter-generator-3300w/
The easiest solution was to just block all /shop/ pages in Google Webmaster Tools (redirects were not an easy option).
This was about 3 months ago, and in months 1 and 2 we undertook some great marketing (soft social book marking, updating the page content, flickr profiles with product images, product manuals onto slideshare etc).
Rankings went up and so did traffic.
In month 3, the changes in robots.txt finally hit and rankings decreased quite steadily over the last 3 weeks.
Im so tempted to take off the robots restriction on the duplicate content.... I know I shouldnt but, it was working so well without it?
Ideas, suggestions?
-
Agreed with Alan (deeper in the comments) - you may have cut off links to these pages or internal link-juice flow. It would be much better to either 301-redirect the "/shop" pages or use the canonical tag on those pages. In Apache, the 301 is going to be a lot easier - if "/shop/product" always goes to "/product" you can set up a rewrite rule in .htaccess and you don't even need to modify the site code (which site-wide canonical tags would require).
The minor loss from the 301s should be much less than the problems that may have been created with Robots.txt. As Alan said, definitely re-point your internal links to the canonical (non-shop) version.
-
No I mean internal links,
if you do a 301, your internal links poiting to shop/ urls will still work, but they will lose a little link juice when they are 301 redirected. you should point them to the final destination the non shop url.
-
No, it was a very new site. There was only 10 links all to the root.
Thanks for your help.
-
Yes i would 301 then
Are there any links pointing to the shop/ version, internal links? then i would fix them also, as 301's leak link juice you should create link that go directly to the destionation page where you can.
-
The difference between blocking something in robots.txt and a 301?
The duplicates are actively created.
When the products are added to the cart plugin, they automatically create the /shop/product page. These pages were horrible for SEO, and as they were automatically created they could not be edited easily (the plugin developers clearly had no SEO understanding).
My client's developer created a new WP Post for every product and added in a shortcode calling the product from the plugin. This created the duplicate. As this is a wordpress post, the SEO was far more adaptable.
-
I dont understand the difference, is this the reason behind the duplicates?
-
No it's Apache.
Would you guys say it's best to just 301 rewrite all /shop/product to /product? Then unblock from robots.txt?
-
I work with Microsoft Technolgies, I dont work with CMS like WP.
On IIS i would use a outgoing url rewrite url to insert the meta tag. You can do this without touching the website.
Are you by any luck hosting on IIS or are you on Apache?
-
The shopping cart WP plugin is creates the /shop/product pages automatically. I have very little control over them.
Instead the developer has created post pages and inserted the product short codes (this gives the /product effect). I have far more control over these pages, and as such they are far better for SEO.
Do you know of a way I can no index/follow, all /shop pages in the robots.txt?
-
I have been telling other not to do what you have done. what is better is you use "no-index follow" tags instead.
Link juice flows into your pages blocked by robots though links to them never to be seen again. If you use the noindex-follow meta tag you allow the link juice to flow in and out.
The best idea is not to have the duplicates, after thet you should use a canonical tag, if that is not posible then use the noindex, follow tag.
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
-
Is writing good content the best SEO?
Hi, After reading Mr. Shepard's amazing article on the 7 concepts of advanced on-page SEO (https://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts), I decided to share my own experience in hopes of helping others. I started doing legal SEO back in 2013. At the time I really didn't know much about SEO. My first client (my brother) had recently left the D.A.'s office to become a criminal defense attorney. I told him to write content for the following areas: domestic violence, sex crimes, and homicide. He finished his first content piece on domestic violence and I was not impressed. It seemed too unique, individualized, and lacked the "generic" feel that many of the currently ranking pages had. Please note that I don't mean "generic" in a negative way. I just mean that his content regarding domestic violence felt too personalized. Granted, his "personalized" approach came from a Deputy D.A. with over 13 years handling domestic violence, sex crimes, and murder cases. I was inclined to re-write his content, but lacking any experience in criminal law I really had no choice but to use it. IMPORTANT: Please note that I barely knew any SEO at the time (I hadn't even yet discovered MOZ), and my brother knew, and continues to know, absolutely nothing about SEO. He simply wrote the content from the perspective of an attorney who had spent the better part of 13 years handling these types of cases. The result? Google: "Los Angeles domestic violence lawyer/attorney", "Los Angeles sex crimes lawyer/attorney", and "Los Angeles homicide attorney." They have held those spots consistently since being published. I know that MANY other factors contribute to the success of content, but at the time I published them we had few links and very little "technical SEO." Unfortunately, I started learning "SEO" and applied standard SEO techniques to future content. The result? Never as good as the articles that were written with no SEO in mind. My purpose in writing this is to help anyone about to tackle a new project or revamp an existing site. Before getting too caught up in the keywords, H tags, and all the other stuff I seem to worry too much about, simply ask yourself - "is this great content?" Thanks again to the MOZ team for the great advice they have shared over the years. Honestly, I think I sometimes become overly reliant on SEO b/c it seems easier than taking the time to write a great piece of content. P.s. Any "SEO" stuff you see on the above-mentioned pages was done by me after the pages ranked well. P.p.s. I don't mean to imply that the above-mentioned pages are perfect, because they are not. My point is that content can rank well even without any emphasis on SEO, as long as the person writing it knows about the subject and takes the time to write something that readers find useful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14403 -
URL Change Best Practice
I'm changing the url of some old pages to see if I can't get a little more organic out of them. After changing the url, and maybe title/desc tags as well, I plan to have Google fetch them. How does Google know that the old url is 301'd to the new url and the new url is not just a page of duplicate content? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Best practices for structuring an ecommerce site
I'm revamping my wife's ecommerce site. It is currently a very low traffic website that is not indexed very well in Google. So, my plan is to restructure it based upon the best practices that helps me avoid duplicate content penalties, and easier to index strategies. The store has about 7 types of products. Each product has approximately 30 different size variations that are sometimes specifically searched for. For example: 20x10x1 air filters, 20x10x2 air filters, 20x10x1 allergy reducing air filters, etc So, is it best for me to create 7 different products with 30 different size variations (size selector at the product level that changes the price) or is it better to create 210 different product pages, one for each style/size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pherbio0 -
Canonical Meta Tag Best Practices
I've noticed that some website owners use canonical tags even when there may be no duplicate issues.For examplewww.examplesite.com has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/" />www.examplesite.com/bluewidget has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidget/" />Is this recommended or helpful to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Best practice for listings with outbound links
My site contains a number of listings for charities that offer various sporting activities for people to get involved in order to raise money. As part of the listing we provide an outbound link for the user to find out more info about each of the charities and their activities. Currently these listings are blocked in the robots.txt for fear that we may be viewed as a 'link farm or spam site' (as there are hundreds of charities listed on the scrolling page) but these links out are genuine and provide benefits and are a useful resource for the user and not paid links. What I'd like to do is make these listings fully crawlable and indexable to increase our search traffic to these listing, but I'm not sure whether this would have a negative impact on our Pagerank with Google potentially viewing all these outbound links as 'bad' or 'paid links', Would removing the listing pages from our robots.txt and making all the outbound links 'nofollow' be the way forward to allow us to properly index the listings without being penalised as some kind of link farm or spam site? (N.B. I have no interest in passing link juice to the external charity websites)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
Local SEO Best Practices
Hello Everyone, I'm new to SEOmoz, I'm looking to use this as a tool to really help me, and evenually I can help others. I am an Web Developer with some online marketing experience. I did Local SEO a Few Years ago, and things have really changed since then. I know this Panda and Penguin update really is putting a hurting on the directory submission. Google no longer has 'Citations" on their places page, and many other changes. With that being said, what are some best practices for Local SEO? I am a propeller head by nature, but am also very creative when I need to be. I have potental sites to market, anywhere from Holistic Medical Doctors, Plastic Surgeons Community Blogs, and Auto Repair Shops, Law firms (to give you some perspectic) I also read Danny Dover's Book, to learn some more about SEO, the one thing that is unclear is how to acquire quality links I would really appreciate any perspective on this, every little thing helps Zach Russell
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZacharyRussell0 -
What are best practices for multi-language seo?
We are looking for best practices for multi-language seo. We are interested in any books, message boards or blogs that you can recommend. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FareCompare0 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0