Duplicate Content Question (E-Commerce Site)
-
Hi All,
I have a page that ranks well for the keyword “refurbished Xbox 360”. The ranking page is an eCommerce product details page for a particular XBOX 360 system that we do not currently have in stock (currently, we do not remove a product details page from the website, even if it sells out – as we bring similar items into inventory, e.g. more XBOX 360s, new additional pages are created for them). Long story short, given this way of doing things, we have now accumulated 79 “refurbished XBOX 360” product details pages across the website that currently, or at some point in time, reflected some version of a refurbished XBOX 360 in our inventory.
From an SEO standpoint, it’s clear that we have a serious duplicate content problem with all of these nearly identical XBOX 360 product pages. Management is beginning to question why our latest, in-stock, XBOX 360 product pages aren't ranking and why this stale, out-of-stock, XBOX 360 product page still is. We are in obvious need of a better process for retiring old, irrelevant (product) content and eliminating duplicate content, but the question remains, how exactly is Google choosing to rank this one versus the others since they are primarily duplicate pages? Has Google simply determined this one to be the original? What would be the best practice approach to solving a problem like this from an SEO standpoint – 301 redirect all out of stock pages to in stock pages, remove the irrelevant page?
Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
Justin
-
_Ideal solutions would be using Meta refresh tag but the problem is search engines are against this practice. So, as things stand, you have to use 301 redirect to fix this issue. I know there is a possibility that ranking may suffer a bit. So, here is the suggestion -
What about making a bit changes in the body content to use this page as a landing page for a new product. I hope you just have to make some changes in the specification or the title will have a slight modification. If you can manage to do this, you will be in a win-win situation. Let us know what you think about this. _
-
One of the likely reasons for the old pages outranking the new one is that they accumulated links, whereas the new one hasn't had the chance yet.
I would do 301 redirects for all these pages pointing to the new one. This will benefit you in a few different ways.
- It would pass the link authority from all these old pages to the new page, helping it's rankings
- It will solve the duplicate content problem with search engines
- Any visitor that enters the site from a link to one of these pages will automatically be sent to the new page
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
-
ViewState and Duplicate Content
Our site keeps getting duplicated content flagged as an issue... however, the pages being grouped together have very little in common on-page. One area which does seem to recur across them is the ViewState. There's a minimum of 150 lines across the ones we've investigated. Could this be causing the reports?
Technical SEO | | RobLev0 -
How bad is it to have duplicate content across http:// and https:// versions of the site?
A lot of pages on our website are currently indexed on both their http:// and https:// URLs. I realise that this is a duplicate content problem, but how major an issue is this in practice? Also, am I right in saying that the best solution would be to use rel canonical tags to highlight the https pages as the canonical versions?
Technical SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi, i work in joomla and my site is www.in2town.co.uk I have been looking at moz tools and it is showing i have over 600 pages of duplicate content. The problem is shown below and i am not sure how to solve this, any help would be great, | Benidorm News http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm-news/Page-2 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-102 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-103 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-104 9 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-106 28 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-11 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-112 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-114 45 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-115 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-116 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-12 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-120 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-123 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-13 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-130 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-131 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-132 31 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-140 4 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-141 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-21 10 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-22 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-23 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-26 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-271 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-274 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-277 50 21 2 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-28 50 21 2 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-29 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-310 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-341 21 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-342 4 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-343 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-345 1 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-346 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-348 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-349 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-350 50 16 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-351 50 19 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-82 24 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town 50 20 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-10 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-100 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-101 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-105 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-107 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-108 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-109 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-110 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-111 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-113 |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is anyone using Canonicalization for duplicate content
Hi i am trying to find out if anyone is using Canonicalization for duplicate content on a joomla site. I am using joomla 1.5 and trying to find either a module or manually how to sort this out as i have over 300 pages of duplicate content because i am not using this technique any help and advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Newbie Duplicate Title Question
We recently update our website with DNN 6. Once the upgrade was done, I kept recieving log in links on my duplicate title and duplicate content error reports. Is anyone familiar with how to stop these links from showing up? Example of link: http://www.faisongroup.com/Login/tabid/750/Default.aspx?returnurl=%2F Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | VeronicaCFowler0 -
Duplicate content with same URL?
SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on: http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL. Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl? Thanks for any help. Mike
Technical SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Wordpress for e-commerce
What plugin should I use to make a webshop taht is good for seo as well? Should I use wordpress indeed or should i use some other open source CMS?
Technical SEO | | sesertin0 -
Duplicate content issues caused by our CMS
Hello fellow mozzers, Our in-house CMS - which is usually good for SEO purposes as it allows all the control over directories, filenames, browser titles etc that prevent unwieldy / meaningless URLs and generic title tags - seems to have got itself into a bit of a tiz when it comes to one of our clients. We have tried solving the problem to no avail, so I thought I'd throw it open and see if anyone has a soultion, or whether it's just a fault in our CMS. Basically, the SEs are indexing two identical pages, one ending with a / and the other ending /index.php, for one of our sites (www.signature-care-homes.co.uk). We have gone through the site and made sure the links all point to just one of these, and have done the same for off-site links, but there is still the duplicate content issue of both versions getting indexed. We also set up an htaccess file to redirect to the chosen version, but to no avail, and we're not sure canonical will work for this issue as / pages should redirect to /index.php anyway - and that's we can't work out. We have set the access file to point to index.php, and that should be what should be happening anyway, but it isn't. Is there an alternative way of telling the SE's to only look at one of these two versions? Also, we are currently rewriting the content and changing the structure - will this change the situation we find ourselves in?
Technical SEO | | themegroup0