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
-
How come canonicalized pages are showing in the Duplicate Titles report?
I am currently removing all duplicate titles from my site via title tag changes, 301's, and in some instances, canonical tags. I'm confused about why the Moz report spit out pages with duplicate titles that are canonicalized to other pages. Does Google actually consider these pages as having duplicate titles? Or is Roger Mozbot not intuitive enough to to disregard those pages?
On-Page Optimization | | StevenLevine0 -
Ecommerce product page duplicate content
Hi, I know this topic has been covered in the past but I haven't been able to find the answers to this specific thing. So let's say on a website, all the product pages contain partial duplicate content - i.e. this could be delivery options or returning policy etc. Would this be classed as duplicate content? Or is this something that you would not get concerned about if it's let's say 5-10% of the content on the page? Or if you think this is something you'd take into consideration, how would you fix it? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | MH-UK0 -
Auto loading articles ?- best practices
Hi all! In the past months I see more and more website that doing 'auto loading articles in scrolling' - can you tell me if it's okay for SEO and what are the best practices for this? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnPalmer1 -
Duplicate content - "Same" profile-information
Hi, I own a casting website with lots of profiles. Some of these profiles only typed in their firstname, email and age, when they registered on the site, and they haven't added more information ever since. From Crawl Diagnostics, I can see that there is "lots" of these profiles, which looks exactly the same (only showing age and firstname), allthought they are not the same. I could add which day the profile were created on the site, to maybe avoid these "duplications". The email will always be hidden. Or, how big an issue is this? Crawl Diagnostics tells me, that there is around 200 of these, and they are "marked" as High Priority. Any ideas on what to do? /Kasper
On-Page Optimization | | KasperGJ0 -
Should extra content be added to item page or resource center?
We run an ecommerce company which sells machines. After the machine is used for X amount of time, we suggest changing the blades in the machines. We have a resource center for customer convenience. We are creating videos and content on how to change the blades in each machine. (each machine is a different process). Do we create videos and content in the resource center and link to the product page or do we beef up our content on the product page by adding that information there? 1 part of us thinks - "The new blade-changing content" is valuable to that product so buyers know the process before buying and hopefully gain some rank juice on the item pages. The other part of us thinks - Keep all resources in the resource center and link to learning resources from the product pages. This version doesn't beef up our product pages but seems to be the logical place to hose the content on the website. Thoughts? Suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | dkeipper0 -
Long list of companies spread out over several pages - duplicate content?
Hi all, I am currently working with a company formation agent. They have a list of every limited company spread over hundreds of pages. What do you guys think? Is there a need for Canonicals? The website is ranking pretty well but I want to make sure there aren't any problems in the future. Here are two pages as examples: http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=MULLAGHBOY+CONSTRUCTION+LIMITED&next=1# http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=%40a+company+limited&next=1# Also what about the actual company pages? See an example below http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?name=AMNA+CONSTRUCTION+LTD&number=06630333#.U8PW6_ldX1s Thanks in advance Aaron
On-Page Optimization | | AaronGro0 -
Is reported duplication on the pages or their canonical pages?
There are several sections getting flagged for duplication on one of our sites: http://mysite.com/section-1/?something=X&confirmed=true
On-Page Optimization | | Safelincs
http://mysite.com/section-2/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-3/?something=X&confirmed=true Each of the above are showing as having duplicates of the other sections. Indeed, these pages are exactly the same (it's just an SMS confirmation page you enter your code in), however, they all have canonical links back to the section (without the query string), i.e. section-1, section-2 and section-3 respectively. These three sections have unique content and aren't flagged up for duplications themselves, so my questions are: Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates, and if so why are the canonical links being ignored? or Are the canonical pages without the query strings the duplicates, and if so why don't they appear as URLs in their own right in the duplicate content report? I am guessing it's the former, but I can't figure out why it would ignore the canonical links. Any ideas? Thanks0 -
Mobile blog creating duplicate title and content issues
My site is set up with a mobile website and after running the on page SEO report on moz it is returning multiple errors for duplicate title tags and duplicate content all related to the mobile website being a direct reflection of the main site. I want to know if this is really an issue. I'm sure Google actually knows the difference between my main site and the mobile version. Do I really need to go through each individual mobile page and change each page title and modify all the content? I really would like to avoid doing this but at the same time would like to fully optimize my site. Any advice is appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | shiftins0