Best practice to solve this Unique duplicate page content issue?
-
I just got Seomoz Pro (it's awesome!), and when I did a campaign for my website I discovered that I have a big issue with duplicate page content (as well as titles).
The Crawl Diagnostics Summary told me I have 196 Crawl Errors Found (I had a total of 362 pages crawled on my site), and as much as 160 of these was duplicate page content. Which to me sounds like a big problem, correct me if I'm wrong (I'm very new to SEO).
So our website is an ecommerce that sells greeting cards. The unique part about our platform is that we offer the customer to make a customization of the cards.
Let me walk you through each step a customer takes so you fully understand:-
They find a card they like and visit the product page of that card (just like on any ecommerce store.)
-
They then decide they want to buy it. There is no "Add to cart" button, they will instead click on a "customize the card" button.
3) This takes them to a step by step process of customizing the card. They change the name on the front of the greeting card so it says for example: "Happy Birthday Katy!". And then adds a personal text on the inside of the card.
- They then add an delivery address and when it should be delivered. After that they proceed to checkout and it's all done.
This is my website (it's in Swedish): loveday.se - it will take you to a product page so that you can click the green button and see what I mean with the customization pages. Hopefully it helps even though it's in Swedish.
My issue starts at the customization part of the site (the bolded step above), as I can see the permalinks in the diagnostics I got.
This step-by-step process looks exactly the same with every card in the store. Same call-to-action headline, same descriptive text etc. The only difference is a JPEG-file with the unique greeting card design.So, what is your take on this? Let me know if I was unclear about something.
Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.
-
-
Ahh, I see! Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it.
I also found from reading one of evovlingSEO's blog posts that with the help of checking my google webmasters account for any reports on duplicate content, I could see if Google had found any duplicate content.
There was no reports on this, so I guess it could be Roger crawling pages that Google don't? But I can see from viewing my source code that the code snippet you suggested me to add isn't there.
I will get back when I know if it's been solved or not for sure!
Thanks again.
-
I see what you mean. Here's what you do for these particular pages.
Since these have no real value as a search engine landing page (since they're basically all the same), Google won't want to send people to them. Seems reasonable, right?
But, because your site has a whole lot of these, Google may also decide that loveday.se as a whole is feeding them content that has a high % of non-useful pages. It's an indicator of an overall low-quality site. This really started to become an issue with the first "Panda" update. So, for each of these particular pages, you want to add a tag to your HEAD section:
| name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /> |
| We tell Google "noindex", because we don't want these pages in their index (really, they don't either, so everyone is happy). They're terrible landing pages for a search engine. |We tell Google to "follow", because the other pages that these are linking to are still of value. And we want Googlebot to continue crawling and crediting internal links on your site.
-
When looking at this link: http://www.loveday.se/personifering/1/utan-facebook
I get these sample URLs (It says it's a total of 50 duplicate URLs):
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/168/julkortshanghttp://www.loveday.se/personifering/145/far-motherfucker
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/123/prispokal
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/136/gravitation
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/63/fing-love-you
I'd say that out of all the 160 duplicate content pages, 99.9% of them have the same link path of http://www.loveday.se/personifiering/... Which is the customization page.
-
Could you provide a few samples of URL's that SEOmoz Pro claims contain duplicate content? It should show you if you click on the error, then click on individual links.
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
-
Duplicate content in Shopify reported by Moz
According to Moz crawl report, there are hundreds of duplicate pages in our Shopify store ewatchsale.com. The main duplicate pages are:
On-Page Optimization | | ycnetpro101
https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches?page=2
https://ewatchsale.com/collections/all/brand_seiko
(the canonical page should be https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches) https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches/gender_mens
(the canonical page should be https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches/mens-watches) Also, I want to exclude indexing of pages URLs with "filter parameters" like https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches/color_black+mens-watches+price_us-100-200 Shopify advised we can't access our robots.txt file. How can we exclude SE crawling of the page URLs with filter names?
How can we access the robots.txt file?
How can we add canonical code to the preferred collection pages? Which templates and what codes to add? Thanks for your advice in advance!0 -
PDF Instructions come up in Crawl report as Duplicate Content
Hello, My ecommerce site has many PDF instruction pages that are being marked as duplicate content in the site crawl. Each page has a different title, and then a PDF displayed in an iframe with a link back to the previous page & to the category that the product is placed in. Should I add text to the pages to help differentiate them? I included a screenshot of the code that is on all the pages. Thanks! Justin 9tD9HMr
On-Page Optimization | | JustinBSLW0 -
Blog on server or embedded? Duplicate content?
Wondering what would be best in terms of SEO. Should I install some blog software actually on the website or can I just embed say a blogger.com blog? if I did that would they consider it duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | Superflys0 -
Best practices for marking up product pages on eccomerce site (SEO noob)
After analyzing the code on various competitors eccomerce sites I wanted to seek advice on best practices for marking up individual product pages for keywords and descriptions. My competition is all over the map as far as utilizing keywords and descriptions, some have few keywords while others have many and vice versa for descriptions. What is the best method for marking up product pages on an eccomerce site for keywords and descriptions? In addition, is it okay to utilize the same keywords for multiple products that may be under the same category? or is this considered duplicate content? Thanks for the help, if you have any resources for SEO and eccomerce sites I would greatly appreciate the guidance best,Michelle & Blake
On-Page Optimization | | LeapOfBelief0 -
Duplicate Page Title issues
Hello, I have a duplicate page title problem: Crawl Diagnostics Reported that my website got **sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Title **between:
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs.html and these URLs below:http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-2
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-3
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-4
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-5 I don't know why, because I have already implemented rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to canonical pages. Please give me an advice!0 -
"Issue: Duplicate Page Content " in Crawl Diagnostics - but these pages are noindex
Saw an issue back in 2011 about this and I'm experiencing the same issue. http://moz.com/community/q/issue-duplicate-page-content-in-crawl-diagnostics-but-these-pages-are-noindex We have pages that are meta-tagged as no-everything for bots but are being reported as duplicate. Any suggestions on how to exclude them from the Moz bot?
On-Page Optimization | | Deb_VHB0 -
How dangerous are duplicate page titles
We ran a SEO crawl and on our report it flag up duplicate pages titles, we investigate further and found that these were page titles from the same product line that had more than one page, e.g 1-50 (products) 51-100 (products) with a next button to move to the following 50 products. These where flagged as duplicate page titles ".../range-1/page-1" and ".../range-1/page-2" These titles are obviously being read as duplicates but because they are the same range we do not know what the best course of action is. We want to know how detrimental these page titles will be to our SEO if at all. If anyone could shed some light on this issue it would be a massive help. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SimonDixon0 -
Filtered Navigation, Duplicate content issue on an Ecommerce Website
I have navigation that allows for multiple levels of filtering. What is the best way to prevent the search engine from seeing this duplicate content? Is it a big deal nowadays? I've read many articles and I'm not entirely clear on the solution. For example. You have a page that lists 12 products out of 100: companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm And then you filter these products: companyname.com/productcategory/filters/page1.htm The filtered page may or may not contain items from the original page, but does contain items that are in the unfiltered navigation pages. How do you help the search engine determine where it should crawl and index the page that contains these products? I can't use rel=canonical, because the exact set of products on the filtered page may not be on any other unfiltered pages. What about robots.txt to block all the filtered pages? Will that also stop pagerank from flowing? What about the meta noindex tag on the filitered pages? I have also considered removing filters entirely, but I'm not sure if sacrificing usability is worth it in order to remove duplicate content. I've read a bunch of blogs and articles, seen the whiteboard special on faceted navigation, but I'm still not clear on how to deal with this issue.
On-Page Optimization | | 13375auc30