Duplicate Page Title problems with Product Catalogues (Categories, Subcategories etc.)
-
Hey guys,
I've done a fair bit of Googling and "mozzing" and can't seem to find a definitive solution. In our product catalogue on our site we have multiple ways to access the product for navigation purposes, and SeoMoz is throwing up hundreds of duplicate page title errors which are basically just different ways to get to the same product yet it sees it as a "separate page" and thus duplicating itself.
Is this just SeoMoz confusing itself or does Google actually see it this way too?
For example, a product might be:
www.example.com/region/category/subcategory/
www.example.com/region2/category/subcategory/
www.example.com/region/category/subcategory2/
etc. Is the only solution to have the product ONLY listed in one combination? This kind of kills our ability to have easy refinement for customers browsing the catalogue, i.e: something that falls under the "Gifts for Men" might also be a match for "Father's Day Gifts" or "Gifts for Dad" etc.
Any solution or advice is greatly appreciated, cheers
-
Google looks at URLs, and not pages. It's the same content, but on different URLs.
If Google delivered mail, it would think the following were all different houses:
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main St., Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210-1234If you're able to use a canonical tag in your custom CMS, you can effectively tell Google that one specific URL is the "right" one, and that all of the others should be treated as if they were the "right" one.
-
Hi Chris,
We aren't using a standardised CMS as our system was built from the ground up by our in-house development team several years ago so I can't give you an exact framework to go by unfortunately.
And yes, Webmaster Tools returns errors for duplication, i.e (i'll give you a sample URL path) we get duplicate title errors for different paths to navigate to the same product:
/jungle-surfing-through-the-daintree-rainforest/jungle-adventures-nightwalks/port-douglas/day-tours/jungle-surfing-canopy-tours/jungle-adventures-nightwalks
In other words, people are finding the raw Operator -> Product link organically and can land there via that route, or they can navigate through our catalogue by
Region -> Category -> Operator -> Product
...but in the end it's the same page they are landing on regardless.
Kind of hard to explain but hope that helps some.
Thanks!
-
Hi Ben,
What CMS are you using for your e-commerce platform e.g. Magento, oscommerce?
If you can let me know what you are using I might be able to help you out a bit more.
Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any duplication issues?
-
I Think this will help you
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ecommerce-seo-making-product-pages-into-great-content-whiteboard-friday
http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-on-ecommerce-sites
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-you-avoid-duplicate-content-within-your-own-e-commerce-website
Remember to use
use rel=canonical as well
I want to ask you a quick question as well is this actually affecting your site what is your page rank? What is your Moz rank? How old is your domain? If your website is ranking well chances are Google understands that it is a e-commerce website and is not penalizing you as it would another type site. If you are being penalized by me know. You may also want to employee majestic SEO tools to look your link profile history in addition to the excellent tools found here. Remember you always have one private question every month if you're a pro member to ask the staff. I hope that it does not come to that however I do SEO on e-commerce sites and just use different descriptions never spin the content though make it fresh every time.
All the best,
Tom
-
- Okay I think I have an answer for you. If you are an e-commerce website and you are having issues with duplicate content because of the reasons you've given let's say the main page shows everything shirts, then another page has blue shirts so the URL like HTTP://example.com/shirts and the blue shirt will be in a URL something like this HTTP://example.com/shirts/blue
- I believe this is forgivable however I would build my site out to reflect a new category and have the wording be unique for each so my blue shirt's description would be different on shirts that would be on shirts/blue I hope that makes some sense however I do believe that there is a whiteboard Friday just after Google dropped Penguin in our lap where Rand discusses this I will look for and add it to this if I can find it however if you look in the search box here on Moz you will want to type in something to the tune of "things we should not worry about after Penguin" now you have to understand I do not recall this exactly so I sincerely hope to you & let me know if I can and help you anymore.
- Respectfully,
- Thomas von Zickell
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
-
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
Kind of duplicate categories and custom taxonomy. Necessary, but bad for SEO?
Hello Everyone! I'm new here! My husband and I are working on creating a website: https://sacwellness.com .The site is an online therapist directory for the the Sacramento California area. Our problem is this: In wordpress our category system is being used for blog posts. Our theme is using a custom taxonomy system to categorize different therapist specialties, therapeutic approaches, etc. We've found ourselves in a position where our custom taxonomy and categories are near duplicates. for example we have the blog categories: ADHD counseling, Anxiety therapy, and Career counseling our corresponding custom taxonomy/therapist categories are: ADHD, Anxiety, and....(oops) career counseling. My understanding is that google doesn't see a difference between identically named categories and custom taxonomies and will so choose one to rank and disregard the other, effectively leaving you competing against yourself. is this true in a case like this? Can google maybe understand the difference because of the custom taxonomy and/or URL paths? if this is a problem is it ok to have near duplicates....like ADHD vs. ADHD counseling. This has been our solution so far....but now we're questioning it....derp x_x. I thought about tagging the categories with no index, but I think the archive pages would be useful for people. Essentially we have 2 sets of archives for each keyword. One is for blog posts, and one is for therapists who work with that particular issue along with the 6 most recent blog posts in that category.....because we are putting the 6 most recent blog posts at the bottom of the therapist pages I feel like it wouldn't be as terrible of a loss if we had to noindex the category pages. ....what do you think? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page
Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps.
I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.0 -
Old product URLs still indexed and maybe causing problems?
Hi all, Need some expertise here: We recently (3 months ago) launched a newly updated site with the same domain. We also added an SSL and dropped the www (with proper redirects). We went from http://www.mysite.com to https://mysite.com. I joined the company about a week after launch of the new site. All pages I want indexed are indexed, on the sitemap and submitted (submitted in July but processes regularly). When I check site:mysite.com everything is there, but so are pages from the old site that are not on the sitemap. These do have 301 redirects. I am finding our non-product pages are ranking with no problem (including category pages) but our product pages are not, unless I type in the title almost exactly. We 301 redirected all old urls to new comparable product, or if the product is not available anymore to the home page. For better or worse, as it turns out and prior to my arrival, in building the new site the team copied much of the content (descriptions, reviews, etc) from the old site to create the new product pages. After some frustration and research I am finding the old pages are still indexed and possibly causing a duplicate content issue. Now, I gather there is supposedly no "penalty", per se, for duplicate content but a page or site will simply not show in the SERPs. Understandable and this seems to be the case. We also sell a lot of product wholesale and it turns out many dealers are using the same descriptions we have (and have had) on our site. Some are much larger than us so I'd expect to be pushed down a bit but we don't even show in the top 10 pages...for our own product. How long will it take for Google to drop the old and rank the new as unique? I have re-written some pages but much is technical specifications and tough to paraphrase or re-write. I know I could do this in Search Console but I don't have access to the old site any longer. Should I remove the 301s a few at a time and see if the old get dropped faster? Maybe just re-write ALL the content? Wait? As a site note, I'm also on a Drupal CMS with a Shopify ecommerce module so maybe the shop.mysite.com vs mysite.com is throwing it off with the products(?) - (again the Drupal non-product AND category pages rank fine). Thoughts on this would be much appreciated. Thx so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mcampanaro0 -
SEO Impact & Google Impact On Removing Product From Category Page for Ecommerce Site
Hello Experts, For my Ecommerce site previously I was showing products at category pages i.e. first all subcategories name after that list all products of all subcateogries. That also approx per category 500 products via load more feature. My query is now I am planning to show products only at Product Listing Page and not on Category pages so what will be SEO impact and how google will treat this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johny123450 -
Pagination on a product page with reviews spread out on multiple pages
Our current product pages markup only have the canonical URL on the first page (each page loads more user reviews). Since we don't want to increase load times, we don't currently have a canonical view all product page. Do we need to mark up each subsequent page with its own canonical URL? My understanding was that canonical and rel next prev tags are independent of each other. So that if we mark up the middle pages with a paginated URL, e.g: Product page #1http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2" />**Product page #2 **http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692" />http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3" />Would mean that each canonical page would suggest to google another piece of unique content, which this obviously isn't. Is the PREV NEXT able to "override" the canonical and explain to Googlebot that its part of a series? Wouldn't the canonical then be redundant?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don340 -
Duplicate titles got me stumped
Webmaster tools is showing duplicate titles for example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/ and: http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire%20/bands-in-lincolnshire/ What's the %20 all about? I didn't create that page and it is a duplicate of the first. I'm also getting them for some pages with capitialisation? Eg: http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/ http://www.musicliveuk.com/Lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/ I have also installed buddypress on another site I work on (I use wordpress) and have since had duplicate title issues for members that have signed up: /members/admin/activity/friends/ /members/admin/activity/groups/ /members/admin/activity/just-me/ These pages are all showing duplicate titles? How can I fix this? I use all in one SEO pack and have <a title="Click for Help!">Canonical URLs checked.</a> Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
How to properly link to products from category pages?
Hi All, We have an e-commerce website and the category pages are built so that there is a product image and below it there is the title. Both the image and the title are in a href (each on its own). I encountered the following unfinished discussion here at MOZ:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-optimize-achor-text-links-on-ecommerce-category-page#post-93758 The discussion states that its improper. The question is - if it is wrong then why? (maybe because Google will give its weight to the image anchor instead of the text anchor since it is higher in the page). The other question is how to resolve the matter?
Should I add nofollow to the image href? Thanks0