Crawl Diagnostics Summary - Duplicate Content
-
Hello SEO Experts,
I am a developer at www.bowanddrape.com and we are working on improving the SEO of the website. The SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostics Summary shows that following 2 URL have duplicate content.
http://www.bowanddrape.com/clothing/Tan+Accessories+Calfskin+Belt/50_5142
http://www.bowanddrape.com/clothing/Black+Accessories+Calfskin+Belt/50_5143
Can you please suggest me ways to fix this problem?
Is the duplicate content error because of same "The Details", "Size Chart" and "The Silhouette" and "You may also like" ?
Thanks,
Chirag
-
It's tough, because these variations/customizations are legitimately what you do. My gut feeling, though, is that 80K (I'm seeing 90K with a site: search) indexed pages is just too much for your current link profile. It doesn't mean you'll get in trouble, but it could mean that your ranking power is spread far too thin.
While it's not a decision I'd take lightly, I do think there's an advantage here to either:
(1) Consolidating variations under one URL
(2) Having multiple URLs, but possibly using rel=canonical (I think that's your best bet) to focus Google on one parent URL for each product
-
Dr. Peter, Thanks for the useful insight, right now google web master tool shows that 82,563 pages on our website are in google's index, but sadly none are getting any direct traffic from google search results. We are "design your own dress company" so each "product" can have 1000s of variations, most are similar to google, but not to the end-user. So I think what you are saying is that consolidating all variations of 1 product to 1 page could result in more power on the single product page. Can you please confirm?
-
I'm gonna disagree mildly. It is common to have color variation pages, and it is perfectly useful to end-users. So, you're not doing anything wrong, in that sense. However, these pages don't look very different to Google (minor variations in title and content), and so we do flag them as near duplicates because Google might consider them "thin". At large scale, that could dilute your ranking ability.
If you have 100s or 1000s of these pages and a relatively weak link profile, it might be worth considering canonical tags here. The trade-off is that you would consolidate your ranking power, but one variation would fall out of search results. So, it really depends not only on the scope of the problem, but the strength of the site, and how important these long-tail color-based searches are to your current traffic. There's no one-sized-fits-all answer.
-
Thanks Eyepaq. I can keep it as is, but I will try to make them more brown or black by adding brown or black to the The Details and the The Silhouette.
-
Thanks. I will try to make them more unique.
-
At the moment the pages are too similar so are coming up as dups, (they also will most likely compete with each other in the serps too)
My advice would be either make them more different content wise, or have one page that covers both terms (I would guess they would be long tail terms anyway, so that might be the best option)
using canonical links it telling google they are the same page content wise and which is the "master page" to show in the serps
-
In this case you can let those be as they are...
No harm to the website or pages for this "issue" - it is a common think for this type of color / type differences and you should not add rel canonical or redirect it s you need them both in the search pages.
There is no down side of having those like this.
Cheers.
-
Thanks for the Reply Bryan. I have used canonical links at other places on the website, where the pages are same.
I want to make the 2 pages so that I can attract users both user searching for black belt as well as brown bag. Would adding canonical links help me in doing that, or am I thinking of this in the wrong way?
-
You need to add a canonical tags to let search engines know that the content is almost identical.
here is an awesome post to get you all set up: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
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
-
In Wordpress getting marked as duplicate content for tags
Moz is marking 11 high priority items for duplicate content. Just switched to wordpress and publishing articles for the site but only have a few. The problem is on the tag pages. Since there aren't very many articles so when you go to the tag pages it lists one or two articles and hence there are pages with duplicate content. Most of the articles have the same tags / categories. Perhaps I'm using too many tags and categories? I'm using about 7 tags and around 2 categories for each post / event. I've read the solution is using canonical tags but a little confused on which page I should use for the tag and then I believe I need to point the duplicate pages to the correct page. For example, I have two events that are for dances and both have the same tags. So when you visit, site.com/tags/dance or site.com/events both pages have the same articles listed. Which page do I select as having the original content? Does it matter? Does that make sense? Someone was also saying I could use the Yoast plugin to fix, but not really seeing anything in the Yoast tools. I also see 301 redirects mentioned as a solution but the tag pages will be changing as we add new articles and they have a purpose so not really seeing that as a solution.
Web Design | | limited70 -
Any alternative techniques to display tabbed content without using Javascript / JSON and be SEO Friendly?
John Mueller's input in the EGWMH hangout suggests that Google MAY ignore expandable content served by Javascript. Are there any alternative techniques to display tabbed content without using Javascript / JSON and be SEO Friendly? I do however view these as good for website interactivity and UX - and see many examples of websites performing well and ranking highly whilst using these techniques - are there any Google friendly ways to serve content on a page so that search bots can recognise and choose to crawl / consume the content as legitimate fodder?
Web Design | | Fergclaw0 -
How to avoid duplicate title tags?
I've got roughly 1200 location pages for a travel client. Since the business does the same thing at every location, the title tags and descriptions are almost identical except for the location name. I know Google likes tags and meta descriptions to be unique, but how many different ways can I write the same title in a 55 character limit? For example, here's how the titles look: Things to do in San Jose, CA | Company Name
Web Design | | Masbro
Things to do in Dallas, TX | Company Name
Things to do in Albuquerque, NM | Company Name **My question: Are 1200 title tags structured this way unique enough for Google? ** I have got the same problem with the meta descriptions, but I can vary those a bit more because i have more characters to work with. Thanks for your input,
Dino2 -
Can anyone recommend a tool that will identify unused and duplicate CSS across an entire site?
Hi all, So far I have found this one: http://unused-css.com/ It looks like it identifies unused, but perhaps not duplicates? It also has a 5,000 page limit and our site is 8,000+ pages....so we really need something that can handle a site larger than their limit. I do have Screaming Frog. Is there a way to use Screaming Frog to locate unused and duplicate CSS? Any recommendations and/or tips would be great. I am also aware of the Firefix extensions, but to my knowledge they will only do one page at a time? Thanks!
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Joomla! Site Returning 12000+ Duplicate Content Errors! W Image
(I do award "Good Answer" and "thumbs up" to responses as earned) I have tried to ask this question previously (maybe not correctly). I have a client that I am doing the on and offsite optimization and the MOZ report is kicking back major errors. I have examples below. They all seem to relate directly to rokecwid and ECWID. Is there ANY solution to fix this? Is this hurting the rankings Since I didn't build the site, I am having to tell the website company what to do when I need changes made to code, etc... I am also not very proficient with Joomla! and my web engineer is one of those closet coders (the best kind to have) and doesn't communicate in a way that a "layman" could understand. He pointed out several issues with the HTML but I don't think that is related to this below. Can anyone tell me what to tell the web company that built this site to get rid of these errors? A very small sample of the urls w errors:
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO
http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spareparts?
Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560097
1 14 1 http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spareparts?
Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560098
1 1 0 http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spareparts?
Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560099
1 14 1 http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spareparts?
Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560100
1 14 1 SEOMOZErrors_zps3a1ce2a2.png0 -
Which Content Causes Duplicate Content Errors
My Duplicate Content list starts off with this URL: http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/bellevue-medical-center-logo Then it lists the five below as Duplicate Content: http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/fonts http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/clear-zone http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/social-media http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/order-stationery http://www.nebraskamed.com/about-us/branding/logo I do notice that most of these pages have images and/or little or no content outside of our sites template. Is this causing SEOmoz to see it as duplicate? Should I use noindex, follows to fix this? This error is happening with branding pages so noindex is an option. What should I do if that's not an option? Should I change our mega menus to be ajax driven to so the links aren't showing up in the code of every page?
Web Design | | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine0 -
SEOMoz crawl report shows a duplicate content and duplicate title for these two url's http://freightmonster.com/ and http://freightmonster.com/index.html. How do I fix this?
What page is attached to http://freightmonster.com/ if it is not the index.html ? Should I do a redirect from the index page to something more descriptive?
Web Design | | FreightBoy1 -
Need advice on diplaying content for Search
Hi every body, I am doing landing page redesign(s). Does any body know or can refer a content carousel that can rotate video and pictures? The "site with images" search option result is a compelling reason to showcase pictures if your space competeiveness (showroom, merchandise, etc) can be improved with a strong image presence. here is my main landing page http://www.shearerpainting.com I know there is alot of stuff, and confusing call to action, but I am looking for strategies to clean it up, clear fous on action (get bid, learn more), but allow users to see that they can dig for more content.
Web Design | | johnshearer0