I have a question about on page links or duplicate contant

[Dataken]

Ok help me out here friends.

I’m working with the warnings and errors for my site.

I have two problems that relate to each other and I want to know if you had to choose what problem what would you choose.

I’m running into some duplicate content and title errors because under categories for my products there are so many products that it creates more than one page and with each new page it has the same title or same content on the page.

I tried to make this less in some cases by showing more products per page like 100 items and in most cases per category it will only show one page now.

Now some times there’s still more than one page and also this creates too many links now on that category page.

So I think I can get rid of all the to many on page links but it will make more pages and duplicate content and title tag.

What would you guys do?

[Dataken]

Thanks Cyrus I will take a look at these articles .

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Ken, this is a really common problem with lots of eCommerce sites today. The problem is lots and lots of category pages with duplicate content/title tags.

First of all, consider what is best for your user. Is 100 products per page the best solution? You might need to test different scenarios to find out.

Second, how best to structure your category pages for maximum SEO benefit? The typical problems are:

• Pagination. Category - Page 2 often looks the same as Category Page 1.
• If the same products are in multiple categories, the categories themselves become near duplication.

The first solution is to make sure your products are properly categorized. If the same product is in 16 different categories, you might want to revisit that.

The second important step is to manage pagination. Adam Audette wrote a great article on Search Engine Land which covers the major pagination issues. It's well worth a read:

http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284

Also, you may want to study how SEOmoz handles it's category pages. For example, consider Page 2 of the "Search Engine Trends" Category. Notice the title tag, meta robots tag, and use (or not) of the canonical tag.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Ken,

I'd actually worry less about the number of links on the page and try to address the duplicate content/title tag issues.

In reality, it's very common and sometimes necessary for websites, especially eCommerce websites, to have more than 100/links per page.  See this post from Dr. Pete.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

[Dataken]

Thank for the reply.

So far I’m thinking its best to make the changes to get the links down fewer than 100 even if it creates more category pages and duplicate content.

My site is not word press it’s a shopping cart ecommerce web site.

It does have some chooses for seo urls and such. I will look at that to see if there’s a way to have the extra pages created by to many products be different from each other.

Just to be clear if category A has 100 products and I list 20 per page it makes a page 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and each page it makes has the same description and title tag. So that makes the duplicate content.

If I add more products per page it makes less pages sometimes only one but then I have more than 100 links per page.

So what’s better duplicate content or to many links?

Thanks Ken

[APICDA]

Hi Ken,

This is an overarching issue with lots of sites which sell several products in each catagory.

Expertlaunch has some good ideas for you to run with.

You may also give some thought into using:

<meta < span="">name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />  on the duplicate content pages .  It will help the remaining pages in the SERPS.  </meta <>

I read this tip in a thread a while back and it worked!  Here is the thread below EGOL mentioned it.  He seems to provide high quality feedback which has helped me in the past.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/avoiding-duplicate-content-with-national-e-commerce-products-and-localized-vendors

[expertlaunch]

Ken,

Please allow me to address each item separately.

Number of links on each page - from my general studies and experience seo, I refrain from using more than 100 links on each page. This is done because Google may view your linking as spammy and may hurt your overall search rankings.

Categories - Make sure that you avoid over-using the same keyword in your categories as this can cause serious issues with Google where it can view such method as keyword stuffing. This can also cause problems down the road with diluting the value of your targeted keywords.

With CRM software like Wordpress, you are able to change your permalink structure via the Permalinks tab. Check your CRM software to see if you are able to customize the link structures to avoid running into this issue.

One important note, when working with a new site it's always a best practice to analyze your keywords and to plan out a map of your site with all pages and urls planned out. This will help you to avoid problems down the road.

I am working on a site right now that had poor categorization and now it is quite a challenge to restructure the links into new categories as this will most often break links which can set you back in terms of seo effort.

Whenever forwarding links always keep in mind that you must always use a proper 301 permanent redirect whenever changing links.

Also you may wish update your sitemap file and submit your site to Google Webmaster.

Hope this helps.