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
-
Hi i have a few pages with duplicate content but we've added canonical urls to them, but i need help understanding what going on
hi google is seeing many of our pages and dupliates but they have canonical url on there https://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/maxi-shirt-dress.html has tags https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html
On-Page Optimization | | hijabgem
has tagshttps://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/quickview/index/view/id/4693
has tags
my question is which page takes authority?and are they setup correct, can you have more than one link rel="canonical" on one page?0 -
Duplicate Content for Event Pages
Hi Folks, I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them? Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue? I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks. Kind Regards Gareth Daine
On-Page Optimization | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Duplicate Page content | What to do?
Hello Guys, I have some duplicate pages detected by MOZ. Most of the URL´s are from a registracion process for users, so the URL´s are all like this: www.exemple.com/user/login?destination=node/125%23comment-form What should I do? Add this to robot txt? If so how? Whats the command to add in Google Webmaster? Thanks in advance! Pedro Pereira
On-Page Optimization | | Kalitenko20140 -
Duplicate page content
Hi Crawl errors is showing 2 pages of duplicate content for my clients WordPress site: /news/ & /category/featured/ Yoast is installed so how best to resolve this ? i see that both pages are canonicalised to themselves so presume just need to change the canonical tag on /category/featured/ to reference /news/ ?(since news is the page with higher authority and the main page for showing this info) or is there other way in Yoast or WP to deal with this & prevent from happening again ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is G clever enough to not consider many instances of a category kw on a category page as kw stuffing ?
Hi Say you have a category page on your ecommerce store for a range of a brands products you sell, say brand is called "Cool Surfboards" and is hence the pages target keyword. This page is being populated by name, image and snippet/description for each of the brands different products in the range, such as: "Cool Surfboards HiFive", "Cool Surfboards Rad" , " Cool Surfboards XYZ" etc etc etc Since there are many products in the range the kw is being repeated aprox 20 times. The page is scoring an A grade but obviously failing in regard to keyword stuffing. However if you remove the brand and rename the products by model name only then the sub product specific pages will fail to be optimised for 'brand and model' and it would seem silly to not name the product what it actually is. So the question is, i take it Google is clever enough to ignore kw stuffing in these types of instances since its not actually kw stuffing and hence should leave as is ? Or will G consider it stuffing/over optimised and you should remove the brand name for the individual product names to prevent this ? cheers dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Locating Duplicate Pages
Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index. Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Duplicate content
Hello, I have two pages showing dulicate content. They are: http://www.cedaradirondackchairs.net/ http://www.cedaradirondackchairs.net/index Not sure how to resolve this issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Ronb10230 -
Article on site and distribution, is it duplicate content?
I was always taught to place all original articles on site, let them get indexed by Google, then put out for distribution through various press release outlets. With the latest penguin update, how does this practice work out concerning duplicate content? In theory, I wrote the article so I should get credit for it on my site first, then push through various distribution outlets to get it out to my targeted audience in my niche field. Typing out loud I would tend to think if the article is on my site first then I would get credit and any others following would be hit by duplicate content if in fact google considered it a dupe violation. Any input on this? Am I on track or am I heading for a train wreck.
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0