Duplicate Content - Products
-
When running a report it says we have lots of duplicate content. We are a e-commerce site that has about 45,000 sku's on the site. Products can be in multiple departments on the site. So the same products can show up on different pages of the site. Because of this the reports show multiple products with duplicate content. Is this an issue with google and site ranking? Is there a way to get around this issue?
-
Hi Patrick - Did James answer your question?
-
jamesscaggs has got it covered but I wanted to post this:
Whiteboard Friday - Faceted Navigation
-
Yes it can be an issue. You should be implementing rel=canonical tags. If you use the rel=canonical tags you can tell Google which pages are "duplicates" and which is the original version. For ecommerce I usually recommend making the most product page in the most relevant category as the canonical and the other versions in other categories/subcategories are not canonical.
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 and rel canonicals?
Hi. I have a question relating to 2 sites that I manage with regards to duplicate content. These are 2 separate companies but the content is off a data base from the one(in other words the same). In terms of the rel canonical, how would we do this so that google does not penalise either site but can also have the content to crawl for both or is this just a dream?
Technical SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
WordPress Duplicate Content Caused By Categories
Hello, We have a wordpress blog that has around 250 categories. Due to our platform we have a hierarchy structure for 3 separate stores. For example iPhone > Apps > Books. Placing a blog post in the books category automatically places it into iPhone and iPhone/Apps category, causing 3 instances of any blog post in this category. Is this an issue? I have seen 2 schools of thought on categories, 1 index follow and 2 noindex follow. I know some of our categories get indexed, but with so many, maybe it is better to noindex them. We also considered reducing our categories to 10 to 12 and use tags to provide the indexed site navigation as follows: Reviews (category) iPhone Book App, iPhone App Store (tags) but this seems a little redundant? Anyone want to take this on? thank you Mike
Technical SEO | | crazymikesapps10 -
Why are these two URLs showing in Moz as duplicate content?
Here is the first URL - http://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/FBPP0000012376.asp Here is the 2nd URL - http://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/flag-spreader.asp Granted I am new to this issue on this website, but what is Roger seeing that I'm not? A lot of our duplicate pages are just like this example.
Technical SEO | | Flaglady0 -
Is duplicate content ok if its on LinkedIn?
Hey everyone, I am doing a duplicate content check using copyscape, and realized we have used a ton of the same content on LinkedIn as our website. Should we change the LinkedIn company page to be original? Or does it matter? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Are aggregate sites penalised for duplicate page content?
Hi all,We're running a used car search engine (http://autouncle.dk/en/) in Denmark, Sweden and soon Germany. The site works in a conventional search engine way with a search form and pages of search results (car adverts).The nature of car searching entails that the same advert exists on a large number of different urls (because of the many different search criteria and pagination). From my understanding this is problematic because Google will penalize the site for having duplicated content. Since the order of search results is mixed, I assume SEOmoz cannot always identify almost identical pages so the problem is perhaps bigger than what SEOmoz can tell us. In your opinion, what is the best strategy to solve this? We currently use a very simple canonical solution.For the record, besides collecting car adverts AutoUncle provide a lot of value to our large user base (including valuations on all cars) . We're not just another leech adword site. In fact, we don't have a single banner.Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JonasNielsen0 -
Same product in Multiple categories ecommerce store, best way to avoid duplicate content?
Hello All, Im building a magento store, with around 500 products. One thing is that I am going to have some products in Multiple categories. Do you think the best solution is to remove any category name from the url structure or would this devalue SEO? Also would the use of canonical links remove any duplicate content issues if the category name was left in. So overall what would get better results No category name in URL (e.g.phonename-model1.html) V category name in url (e.g. phones/phonename-model1.html / videophones/phonename-model1.html +using canonical links Any feedback or views would be great
Technical SEO | | voipme0 -
Duplicate Content
Many of the pages on my site are similar in structure/content but not exactly the same. What amount of content should be unique for Google to not consider it duplicate? If it is something like 50% unique would it be preferable to choose one page as the canonical instead of keeping them both as separate pages?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate Content within Website - problem?
Hello everyone, I am currently working on a big site which sells thousands of widgets. However each widget has ten sub widgets (1,2,3... say) My strategy with this site is to target the long tail search so I'm creating static pages for each possibly variation. So I'll have a main product page on widgets in general, and also a page on widget1, page on widget2 etc etc. I'm anticipating that because there's so much competition for searches relating to widgets in general, I'll get most of my traffic from people being more specific and searching for widget1 or widget 7 etc. Now here's the problem - I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget. However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles. So... what do I do with the content. Put it on the main widget page was the plan but what do I do about the sub pages. I could put it there and it would make perfect sense to a reader and be relevant to people specifically looking for widget1, say, but could there be a issue with it being viewed as duplicate content. One idea was to just put a snippet (first 100 words) on each sub page with a link back to the main widget page where the full copy would be. Not sure whether I've made myself clear at all but hopefully I have - or I can clarify. Thanks so much in advance David
Technical SEO | | OzDave0