How can you avoid duplicate content within your own e-commerce website
-
One of the e-commerce websites I am working on is giving me a lot of duplicate content errors because all of the products are the same, just different sizes.
Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem or should i just ignore it?
Someone in the office brought up the idea to just use an i frame for all product descriptions.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
-
Short and sweet answer
- rel canonical the pages where you sort by ( siz, price , etc ) even for product you classify by color .( more reading )
- If the pages are split up in to separate pages add rel=prev and rel=next to them ( more reading )
-
We are talking five pages - this isn't going to get you penalized. Please consider my suggestion above. You must know why someone would buy the small versus large size and you can write we recommend this size for people looking for best value and who have this type of requirement etc...
-
In that case i would rel=canonical to one version of the product, preferably the most popular size.
I'm not sure about the system you have used to create the site, but you could potentially have single page with a drop down allow users to select the sizes/flavours etc which updates the price on the fly.
-
There is no way I can create 1 page for all of the products. They already have different flavors and all the prices are different. I can definitely stress the sizes for title and meta tags, but unfortunately all of the directions are the same, descriptions for product flavors the same, and customer benefits are the same. If you guys want take a look at the website it is www.petsspark.com. And here is the link to the products http://www.petsspark.com/Tear-Stain-Eliminators-s/1822.htm
-
There is no way I can create 1 page for all of the products. They already have different flavors and all the prices are different. I can definitely stress the sizes for title and meta tags, but unfortunately all of the directions are the same, descriptions for product flavors the same, and customer benefits are the same. If you guys want take a look at the website it is www.petsspark.com. And here is the link to the products http://www.petsspark.com/Tear-Stain-Eliminators-s/1822.htm
-
The easiest solution when the products are the same but different sizes is to rel=canonical to one of the sizes from the duplicate pages of differing size options.
The best solution however is to create one page with all sizes on the page, this is a bit more difficult to do as requires some programming, design etc. but it is worth the effort from both an SEO and UX perspective
check out the folloowing article for info on rel=canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalizationHope that helps
-
You need to stress the different sizes in the Title, Meta, H1, Product Description and H1 tag. Also, if possible I would spend the time to write about the use cases for each individual size. The iframe is a bad idea and would not help at all.
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
-
Content Issues: Duplicate Content
Hi there
Technical SEO | | Kingagogomarketing
Moz flagged the following content issues, the page has duplicate content and missing canonical tags.
What is the best solution to do? Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/industrial-flooring/ Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring/0 -
URL slash creating duplicate content
Hi All, I currently have an issue whereby by domain name (just homepage) has: mydomain.com and: mydomain.com/ Moz crawler flags this up as duplicate content - does anyone know of a way I can fix this? Thanks! Jack
Technical SEO | | Jack11660 -
Duplicate content and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
What to do with old website still online & duplicate content
I launched a new wordpress site at www.cheaptubes.com in Sept. I haven't taken the old one down yet, it is still at http://65.61.43.25/ The reason I left it up is I wanted to make sure everything was properly redirected 1st. Some pages and images are still ranking but most point to the new site. When I search for carbon nanotubes pricelist and look in images I see some of our images on the old site are still ranking there https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://65.61.43.25/images/single-walled-nanotubes.1.gif&imgrefurl=http://65.61.43.25/ohfunctionalizedcnts.htm&h=359&w=451&tbnid=HKlL84A_9X0jGM:&docid=N2wdCg7rSQBsjM&ei=-A2qVqThL4WxeKCyjdAM&tbm=isch&ved=0ahUKEwikvcWdxczKAhWFGB4KHSBZA8oQMwhJKCIwIg I guess I can put WP on the old server and do some 301s from there but I'm not sure if that is best or if I should just kill it off entirely? My rankings took a hit on Nov 15th and business has been bad ever since so I'm trying to figure this out quickly. Moz.com and onpage.org both say my site has duplicate content on several pages. I've looked at the content and it isn't duplicate. How can I figure this out? Google likely see's it the same way. These aren't duplicate pages, they are different products. I even searched my product pages to make sure I didn't have 2 of each in there and I don't. With Moz its mostly product tags it sees as duplicate but the products are completely different
Technical SEO | | cheaptubes0 -
Do you think my client is being hit for duplicate content?
Wordpress website. The client's website is http://www.denenapoints.com/ The URL that we purchase so that we could setup the hosting account is http://houston-injury-lawyers.com, which shows 1 page indexed in Google when I search for site:http://houston-injury-lawyers.com On http://www.denenapoints.com/ there is <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/"> But on http://houston-injury-lawyers.com it says the same thing, <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/" /> Is this how it should be setup, assuming that we want everything to point to http://denenapoints.com/? Maybe we should do a 301 redirect to be 100% Sure? Hopefully I explained this well enough. Please let me know if anyone has any thoughts, thanks!
Technical SEO | | georgetsn0 -
Tags, Categories, & Duplicate Content
Looking for some advice on a duplicate content issue that we're having that definitely isn't unique to us. See, we are allowing all our tag and category pages, as well as our blog pagination be indexed and followed, but Moz is detecting that all as duplicate content, which is obvious since it is the same content that is on our blog posts. We've decided in the past to keep these pages the way they are as it hasn't seemed to hurt us specifically and we hoped it would help our overall ranking. We haven't seen positive or negative signals either way, just the warnings from Moz. We are wondering if we should noindex these pages and if that could cause a positive change, but we're worried it might cause a big negative change as well. Have you confronted this issue? What did you decide and what were the results? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | bradhodson0 -
What could be the cause of this duplicate content error?
I only have one index.htm and I'm seeing a duplicate content error. What could be causing this? IUJvfZE.png
Technical SEO | | ScottMcPherson1 -
Avoiding Duplicate Content in E-Commerce Product Search/Sorting Results
How do you handle sorting on ecommerce sites? Does it look something like this? For Example: example.com/inventory.php example.com/inventory.php?category=used example.com/inventory.php?category=used&price=high example.com/inventory.php?category=used&location=seattle If not, how would you handle this? If so, would you just include a no-index tag on all sorted pages to avoid duplicate content issues? Also, how does pagination play into this? Would it be something like this? For Example: example.com/inventory.php?category=used&price=high__ example.com/inventory.php?category=used&price=high&page=2 example.com/inventory.php?category=used&price=high&page=3 If not, how would you handle this? If so, would you still include a no-index tag? Would you include a rel=next/prev tag on these pages in addition to or instead of the no-index tag? I hope this makes sense. Let me know if you need me to clarify any of this. Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | AlexanderAvery1