Duplicate content from category pages?
-
I have an ecommerce store with different categories for my products. Some products do appear in more than one category, is that an issue even if you end up on the same product page/link?
Also, I have a "show all products" category, which I believe creates duplicate content too?
What is your take on this? What can I do to solve this? Is it even an issue of duplicate content?
All answers are very much appreciated!
-
Hey all, I was reading this post and I have a slightly different situation wherein my products are appearing in different categories as duplicate entries and also as different urls, what are the implications then?
-
Yeah, I think Nakul is on the right track here. You don't have to worry about the product pages themselves, because the categories converge on one URL. The search pages could be considered "thin" content, but it really depends on the scope of pages relative to your overall site. Rel=prev/next is a good bet for reducing your exposure (and it's low risk), but the solution depends a bit on the situation.
It's not a high-risk situation - it's more a matter of diluting your index (potentially) with hundreds or thousands of search pages that Google may not find very valuable.
-
Ohh sorry.. In that case, you do not need to implement canonical code .. sorry my bad ..:(
_So, what I understand is that you are concerned about boiler plate template and what I personally feel is that you do not need to worry about them because this is not going to affect the visibility of your website in one way or the other. _
-
It's only the product name in the category listings. Great! Thanks a lot Nakul.
-
Daniel, are you displaying product description on these category pages ? If not, if it's just the product name, you are fine.
-
Alright. My website is just a few months old and I haven't been that active promoting it or improving it (until just a few weeks back now).
My domain authority I would say is very low, maybe you know a way I can find out exactly what it is?
We have less than 200 products on the site, and as stated earlier 3-4 out of 10 is visible in more than one category (duplicated).
Does this give you any indication on my situation, to be able to give me advice on what to do to resolve this?
Once again, thank you for your patience!
-
Deb, Daniel's case does not sound like having multiple URLs of the same Product. It's just that the same product is listed under multiple categories. So depending upon the percentage of duplicate products vs the unique products listed in a category, it may or may not be okay. Also, this may vary based on how big your website is, unique content on the category level pages as well as the overall domain authority.
-
Daniel
I am guessing you have around 200 products exposed in approximately 18 categories, however there may be some overlap in the products within the categories, but the product URLs themselves are unique, so there is no content duplication between the product URLs themselves. You are just checking to make sure if a Red Widget Listed under Category A as well as Category B is okay. With your ratio being 3-4 out of 10, I won't be concerned.
If however this increases to over 50%, I'd be concerned in having 20 category pages being duplicate of each other by over 50%. The closer to 100%, the higher the risk. The closer to 0%, the lower the risk.
And it's just the product name you display on the category level page, not the product description right ? If yes, I'd say you are good to go. Don't worry about it too much at this point.
I hope this helps.
-
So if it is the same URL to the product page in both categories it is visible, it's no problem at all?
For example:
Product X is visible in two categories, category Y and category Z.
I first visit the product through category Y, and the URL is: www.example.com/productx/1
And I then visit the same product, but this time through category Z. The URL for the product page is exactly the same: www.example.com/productx/1And there is no sign of redirect, as I should see a reload of the page changing the url when I first land on the product page, right?
Would be great if you could get give green light! Or tell me what to do if there still is a problem after all. Thanks!
-
if the same product is available two or more different paths/URLs, you need to set the preferred version as canonical. This will fix the issue of internal duplicate content. -
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
Make sure that you are adding link reference of only canonical version of the URLs in the XML sitemap.
-
As I read the posts you suggested, I realized I was not clear enough when I wrote my question.
What the "show all" means on my page is that it shows ALL products from ALL categories in a new/separate category called "show all".
So it is NOT as in the example on google webmasters blogpost, that it is a "show all" alternative in every single category showing that category products on one page.
Hope I was more clear this time! Thank you for your patience.
-
Thanks for the response Nakul!
I would say that 3-4 out of 10 products are shown in more than one category. As for how many categories I have, there is 18 unique categories (and then you have the "show all" on top of that).
Our domain authority is pretty low so far (working on it ;). Our site was launched just a couple months back and we havn't been that active with improving it until just a few weeks back.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "page 1, page 2 and a show all"? Nor, "Is it to land on Page 1 or the View-All page". What page are you talking about when you say Page 1?
If I understand you correctly, we do have several pages of products under the "show all" category (i.e. it's not displaying all products in one single long page).
The products in the "show all" category are exact duplicates from the ones in the specific categories. The products in "show all" are unique from each other though.
You are very helpful! I'm just trying to understand more clearly.
-
How widespread is your "products" appearing in multiple categories ? ARe you talking about 8 out of 10 products in the category duplicate / very similar to the same collection appearing in the other category ? It really depends how many categories you have, how many products, how deep this is compared to what other unique data you have on the page combined with your domain authority etc.
As for Show All, do you also have page 1, page 2 and a show all ? Do they have unique page titles and descriptions ? What do you want to appear in the SERPS for the users ? So if I search on Google for Red Widgets, what's a good experience for me. Is it to land on Page 1 or the View-All page ? Based on what you want to do, I suggest you look at:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
I hope this helps.
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 - Pricing Plan tables
Hey guys, We're faced with a problem that we want to solve. We're working on the designs for a few pages for a drag & drop email builder we're currently working on, and we will be having the same pricing table on several pages (much like Moz does). We're worried that Google will take this as duplicate content and not be very fond of it. Any ideas about how we could integrate the same flow without potentially harming ranking efforts? And NO, re-writing the content for each table is not an option. It would do nothing but confuse the heck out of our clients. 😄 Thanks everybody!
On-Page Optimization | | andy.bigbangthemes0 -
Thin Content pages
I have a couple of pages that are thin content. One is essentially a page with the icons of our customers and a link out to their website. The other is a summary portfolio page that has some images of some of the client work we have done with links to internal pages that have more details about each client situation, approach, etc. These deeper pages are just fine. What is the recommendation for handling these thin content pages? We could add content, but then it wouldn't really help the user very much.
On-Page Optimization | | ExploreConsulting0 -
Duplicate Content with ?Page ID's in WordPress
Hi there, I'm trying to figure out the best way to solve a duplicate content problem that I have due to Page ID's that WordPress automatically assigns to pages. I know that in order for me to resolve this I have to use canonical urls but the problem for me is I can't figure out the URL structure. Moz is showing me thousands of duplicate content errors that are mostly related to Page IDs For example, this is how a page's url should look like on my site Moz is telling me there are 50 duplicate content errors for this page. The page ID for this page is 82 so the duplicate content errors appear as follows and so on. For 47 more pages. The problem repeats itself with other pages as well. My permalinks are set to "Post Name" so I know that's not an issue. What can I do to resolve this? How can I use canonical URLs to solve this problem. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | SpaMedica0 -
Identifying Duplicate Page Title
Moz weekly reports, among other things, the "Duplicate Page Title". How can I identify which two urls/pages have duplicate page titles? Is there any simple way to trace?
On-Page Optimization | | Sequelmed0 -
Noindex child pages (whose content is included on parent pages)?
I'm sorry if there have been questions close to this before... I've using WordPress less like a blogging platform and more like a CMS for years now... For content management purposes we organize a lot of content around Parent/Child page (and custom-post-type) relationships; the Child pages are included as tabbed content on the Parent page. Should I be noindexing these child pages, since their content is already on the site, in full, on their Parent pages (ie. duplicate content)? Or does it not matter, since the crawlers may not go to all of the tabbed content? None of the pages have shown up in Moz's "High Priority Issues" as duplicate content but it still seems like I'm making the Parent pages suffer needlessly... Anything obvious I'm not taking into consideration? By the by, this is my first post here @ Moz, which I'm loving; this site and the forums are such a great resource! Anyways, thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | rsigg0 -
Old landing page modifications - should I change the content?
One of our most popular landing page is starting to be a little bit out dated, should I keep the old content and update with newer text or is it safe to completely replace the old content with the new content without losing our organic traffic on this page?
On-Page Optimization | | rusted880 -
How to get rid of those duplicate pages
Hi eveyone Just got my first diagnostics report and i got 220 duplicate page titles and 217 duplicate content pages. I know why this has happened it is because i did play about a bit and did originally have:- www.mydomainname.com/index.php/alpha Then i change the page path to:- www.mydomainname.com/alpha Then i change the page path to:- www.mydomainname.com/category/alpha So now when i get crawled i have 3x duplicate page titles, descriptions and page content. Even when i have put 301 redirects to my preferred domain path. Which is hurting my seo, right? How do i stop theold domains from giving me these bad reports? The site is on Joomla Thanks guys Oujipickle
On-Page Optimization | | oujipickle0 -
How much constitutes duplicate content in your opinion?
Mornin' In your experience, how much constitutes duplicate content? A sentence, a paragraph, half a page, etc? What about quotes - are they considered duplications, too, if there aren't quotation marks? Over the years, the client has been a bit bad in taking a paragraph from here, a sentence from there, and coupling it all together as daily news on their site. I'm now in the middle of a purge. Oh boy! All hail originality.
On-Page Optimization | | Martin_S0