Does this site have a duplicate content issue?
-
Google WMT is showing me only 2 short meta descriptions under "HTML Improvements" but I believe http://www.customgia.com may have a content duplication issue. Numerous keywords are used repeatedly across many product descriptions. To make matters worse, every product page has a "Design It!" button that sends the user to a flash-based jewelry designer in which they can edit the product's appearance. I'm not sure if these "designer pages" are adding unnecessary and potentially damaging duplicate content but it's certainly a possibility.
There are many items on this site that are similar to one another but not the same. The product description tend to use the same phrases over and over again - words like crystal, Swarovski, beaded, design it, customize, change, pearl, glass beads, iridescent, pearl, drop earrings are used a lot. What I'm stuck on is whether or not I should be focusing on a content duplication issue as the primary SEO problem or if there is something bigger. Thank you for any assistance you can provide!
-
This is where things get a bit dicey - I'm not 100% sure that won't remove the main page, too (and how Google handles the trailing "/"). You might need a "/*" wild-card in the Robots.txt. Frankly, I'd ease into it with just one directory. These things never seem to work quite the way in practice that we all say they should in theory.
-
Okay, last question on this (I hope). As far as I can tell, Google's URL removal tool does not support the use of wildcards. And according to their removal requirements, I can't remove an entire directory unless that directory is already blocked in the robots.txt. So before I submit the removal request for: http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-necklace/, I have to add: Disallow: /design-your-own-jewelry/classic-necklace/ to robots.txt. Is this the right way to do this? And again, thanks for helping me with this.
-
Oh, sorry - yeah, this is why these questions can be dangerous in the scope of Q&A. If some of the pages in that virtual folder are main nav pages/links, then it's definitely going to look weird to block them (it's a mixed signal, at best). I'm not sure I fully understand the site structure, but my gut reaction is to leave those indexed. The wild-cards should work - the other option would be to give them each their own shorter URLs and not put them in the "/design-your-own-jewelry" folder, but that can be a ton of work, depending on how your site is built (plus, you'd have to 301-redirect the old URLs, which opens up a whole new mess).
-
Thank you for the excellent advice. We put the META NOINDEX tags into place this morning. The URL removal request is next but I have a slight change to what Everett outlined above.
The six designer pages that are accessible from the homepage: /design-your-own-jewelry/classic-necklace, /design-your-own-jewelry/simple-necklace, /design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet, /design-your-own-jewelry/simple-bracelet, /design-your-own-jewelry/pendant-necklace, /design-your-own-jewelry/drop-earrings are not duplicates and the Moz crawl did not show them as duplicates. All the other designer pages are considered duplicates of each other or duplicates of one of these six pages. So we put INDEX, NOFOLLOW on these six pages to keep them indexed. I think the removal request should follow suit.
What's your opinion on placing a removal request for each of the following? - /design-your-own-jewelry/classic-necklace/, /design-your-own-jewelry/simple-necklace/, /design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/, /design-your-own-jewelry/simple-bracelet/, /design-your-own-jewelry/pendant-necklace/, /design-your-own-jewelry/drop-earrings/. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this should remove all the designer pages from the index except the six that are accessible from the homepage, giving those six pages a chance to rank.
-
That sounds like a winning plan Dr. Pete, though I'd append 2.1 "Request removal of directory in Bing and Google webmaster tools".
-
I've had a lot of issues where, if pages were already indexed, Robots.txt did a poor job of removing them. Absolutely agree on the crawl budget issue and it's a whole lot easier to remove a folder in Robots.txt, but I've just had a bunch of odd problems with Robots.txt at large scale. If I actually had to do it on my own site, I'd probably:
(1) META NOINDEX the pages
(2) Monitor removal
(3) Once removal was progressing well (80%+), then add to Robots.txt
-
I agree with Dr. Pete here, though I think the easiest solution would be to simply block the entire /design-your-own-jewelry/* directory from being indexed using robots.txt and, to Dr. Pete's point, you'll want to remove that directory from the index in both Bing and Google webmaster tools, as discussed here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/04/requesting-removal-of-content-from-our.html (see the section under "entire directory")
Something I think about with regard to robots.txt block Vs meta robots block is crawl budget. Google has to access a page to see the meta noindex tag, while a single disallow statement in the robots.txt file can save Googlebot the hassle of visiting potentially thousands of unnecessary pages.
If down the road you figure out a way to put custom content on those pages and want to try and rank for things like "Custom Garnet Pearl Bracelet" or "Design Your Own Beaded Bracelet" then I'd look into some of the other options discussed here. Until then I feel they would just be complicating something as simple as the need to remove very thin, mostly duplicate content from the index.
-
Each of these problems may have a unique solution, so it gets complicated. Regarding the "design your own" pages, I'm seeing over 5K of those URLs in the search index, and they do probably look very similar. Since these are not the core product pages, I'd strongly consider using META NOINDEX on them. I find that Robots.txt does not do a good job of blocking content that has already been indexed, in most cases. You can add the meta tag dynamically in your code, hopefully, so that just a few lines of code will serve all of these pages.
While these pages aren't "true" duplicates, they look similar enough that, at the scale of your site, they really are diluting your ability to rank. In extreme cases, if you're also serving up product variations, paginated search results, etc., you could even run into Panda issues. Whether or not this is your core problem, from an SEO perspective, cleaning it up can't hurt, and may make it easier to find other problems.
-
Even if the 'design' part was not flash the textual content is pretty much identical. There is no benefit for it to be indexed so canonical to the main directory URL would make sense. Then add some good text to those main pages.
Personally I would only use H1 for user experience rather than keywordy as they don't carry much weight.
-
Yes, the page http://www.customgia.com/fashion-beaded-jewelry/shop-for/beaded-bracelets/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 is a unique product page with a unique description. The designer page you referenced: http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 is also unique because it loads the jewelry design in the product page.
On every product page the "Design It!" button opens a flash-based designer page that let's the user edit that particular design. Unfortunately, the Moz crawler (and I assume Google) considers these pages duplicates of http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/ (or one of the other five jewelry patterns). The fact that every designer page loads a unique jewelry design does not seem to matter. The best (and most costly) solution, I suppose would be to change all the flash code to html but that isn't happening anytime soon.
The
tag on all the designer pages is either "Classic Bracelet", "Classic Necklace", "Simple Necklace", "Simple Bracelet", "Pendant Necklace" or "Drop Earrings" (depending on which pattern was used to create the design). Maybe changing the
to something like: Redesigning "Garnet Pearl Bracelet with Silver Hearts" would help tell Google these pages indeed differ from one another - but I think the content below the
will still be considered duplicate. If I use canonical tags on these pages, is there any point in creating dynamic
tags if it doesn't improve the user experience? Thanks again!
-
On a brief view:
http://www.customgia.com/fashion-beaded-jewelry/shop-for/beaded-bracelets/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 looks like it is a unique product page with potentially unique description? If so leave as is.
http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 looks a duplicate of http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/ so I would set rel canonical on any http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/CODE page pointing to ...design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/
I hope this helps.
-
Initially I thought canonical tags would work best. If we use them, should the canonical tag for the page: http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 point to the "parent" product page: http://www.customgia.com/fashion-beaded-jewelry/shop-for/beaded-bracelets/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 or do you think it should point to the appropriate designer page: http://www.customgia.com/design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/? - (The design that appears on these pages is based on the six products that appear on the homepage.)
The first solution, I suppose, would pass authority/PageRank to the "parent" product page. Whereas the second solution would pass authority/PageRank to one of the six designer pages. I'm not sure which is a better solution but I'm favoring pointing the pages to it's "parent" product page.
The priority is to fix the duplication content issue but a bump in ranking for any of these pages is obviously a bonus. Thanks for your help!
-
If you add rules to robots.txt that does not mean those directories will be removed from the index. You will also need to remove them in Webmaster Tools >> Google Index >> Remove URLs >> set Reason to Remove Directory.
Having said that why not use canonical tags on pages like /design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/AADE17E9BB964352B7A3912294BB5DF8 - http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
-
You are so welcome, and as I said, technical SEO is something I've been thrust into learning because of my current situation as an in-house SEO.
I think you may be on the right track, but there are other, very talented technical SEOs here who I would ask for a second on your decision. Perhaps Dr. Pete, Ian Lurie, or Everett Sizemore could chime in with a much more accurate response on the robots.txt
Good luck!
-
Thanks for the quick response. The Crawl Diagnostics report I just rec'd identified all the designer pages as duplicate content (these are the pages that load when the "Design It!" button is clicked).
The current robots.txt file does not disallow the designer pages. There are six different types of designer pages. Each of the 967 products loads one type of designer page, depending on the jewelry pattern the item was created with. Do you think the correct solution is to disallow these designer pages in the robot.txt file? I think the new robot.txt file should look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /design-your-own-jewelry/classic-bracelet/
Disallow: /design-your-own-jewelry/classic-necklace/
Disallow: /design-your-own-jewelry/drop-earrings/
Disallow: /design-your-own-jewelry/pendant-necklace/
Disallow: /design-your-own-jewelry/simple-bracelet/
Disallow: /design-your-own-jewelry/simple-necklace/Your help with this is very much appreciated.
-
First off, welcome!
Second, I would say don't worry at all about your call to action button. Every eCommerce site has call to action buttons on every page (i.e. "Add to Cart"). The pages that happen after that don't matter to search engines with one caveat...just make sure you have a properly configured Robots.txt file.
Third. If all of your product pages are indeed trying to capitalize on the same key terms....yes, you have a duplicate content problem. Don't wait for a tool to tell you what you already know in your heart!
Take some time, and prioritize and start to re-write you product pages to use a wider variety of keywords (particularly long-tail) that better describe the products you offer.
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
-
Duplicate content - "Same" profile-information
Hi, I own a casting website with lots of profiles. Some of these profiles only typed in their firstname, email and age, when they registered on the site, and they haven't added more information ever since. From Crawl Diagnostics, I can see that there is "lots" of these profiles, which looks exactly the same (only showing age and firstname), allthought they are not the same. I could add which day the profile were created on the site, to maybe avoid these "duplications". The email will always be hidden. Or, how big an issue is this? Crawl Diagnostics tells me, that there is around 200 of these, and they are "marked" as High Priority. Any ideas on what to do? /Kasper
On-Page Optimization | | KasperGJ0 -
What is the best way to resolve duplicate content issue
Hi I have a client whose site content has been scraped and used in numerous other sites. This is detrimental to ranking. One term we wish to rank for is nowhere. My question is this: what's the quickest way to resolve a duplicate content issue when other sites have stolen your content? I understand that maybe I should firstly contact these site owners and 'appeal to their better nature'. This will take time and they may not even comply. I've also considered rewriting our content. Again this takes time. Has anybody experienced this issue before? If so how did you come to a solution? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | sicseo0 -
Using a lightbox - possible duplicate content issues
Redesigning website in Wordpress and going to use the following lightbox plug-in http://www.pedrolamas.pt/projectos/jquery-lightbox/ Naming the original images that appear on screen as say 'sweets.jpg'
On-Page Optimization | | Jon-C
and the bigger version of the images as 'sweets-large.jpg' Alt text wise I would give both versions of the images slightly different descriptions. Do you think there would be any duplicate content issues with this? Anything I should do differently? I'm very wary of doing anything that Google is likely to think is naughty, so want to stay on their good side! Cheers
T0 -
Content Update
Hello, If I update the existing content i.e.I added some content to the already existing indexed content in a post,how will it effect SEO wise? Venkee
On-Page Optimization | | Venkee0 -
Is This Duplicate Content Hurting Our SERPs?
We sell 1000s of audio book title, many of which are published in more than one format (abridged, unabridged CD, and/or unabridged MP3) by the same publisher. Currently each title has its own page but the basic description of the title (story) is the same. Here is an example title that is offered in three formats. 44 Charles Street - Danielle Steel - abridged CD audiobook 44 Charles Street - Danielle Steel - MP3 CD audiobook 44 Charles Street - Danielle Steel - CD audiobook Each of the above pages has a different page title, a different URL, a different meta description however much of the body (from [Listen to a FREE Audio Clip] down is the same. Is this duplicate content hurting our SERPs?
On-Page Optimization | | lbohen1 -
Duplicate content issue in SEOmoz campaign.
Hi, We are running a campaign for a website in SEOmoz. We get a dup content issue warning: http://www.oursite.com and http://www.oursite.com/ are being seen as 2 different urls. Only difference among 2 urls is the trailing slash at the end of the second url. Why is this happening? I was aware of www vs non www but never heard of an issue related to the slash. Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH1 -
DUPLICATE PAGE TITLE ISSUE
Hi We have 25 pages with a download form on it. People arrive at the page through a ink with optimised anchor text which sits on the information pages. As there is no information on these pages we do not need them to be optimised so the developer has given all the download pages exactly the same page title. Although the pages in themselves are not significant would this effect the way Google viewed the whole site, and would it pay to make each one unique or doesn't it really matter. Alternatively, is there a better way to handle this? and if so would that ligate the benefit of the anchor text. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PH2920 -
Duplicate content issue with dynamically generated url
Hi, For those who have followed my previous question, I have a similar one regarding dynamically generated urls. From this page http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html the user can make a selection according to various criteria. 6 results are presented and then the user can go to the next page. I know I should probably rewrite url's such as these: http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html?pageNo=1&selType=&selCity=&selPrice=&selBeds=&selTrad=&selMod=&selOcean= but since all the results presented are basically generated on the fly for the convenience of the user, I am afraid google my consider this as an attempt to generate more pages as there are pages for each individual listing. What is my solution for this? Nofollow these pages? Block them thru robots txt?
On-Page Optimization | | multilang0