How do I handle duplicate content of the same product in Multiple product categories?
-
I am building a BigCommerce store for selling framed art. Many of the pieces of art will fall in more than one product category.
Let's say I have a framed print of a photograph of a western landscape. This piece of art would fit into these categories; "western", "landscape", and "photography". I would have three pages with duplicate content for just this one framed print.
Will google give me less page rank due to this? Can all the link juice be given to just one of the three categories by use of rel=canonical? If so, does anyone know how to do this for a bigcommerce site?
I would appreciate any feedback.
Thanks,
Kelly
-
Hey Kelly,
Awesome! I am so glad that relieved your worries. You are very welcome
Dana
-
Hello Dana,
It works perfectly! I entered one product under three different categories and the same URL showed for all three.
Thank You!
Kelly
-
Thanks for your help!
-
Hello Dana,
BigCommerce does allow a person to assign a product to multiple categories so it probably works the same way. I was under the impression that when one product was assigned to multiple categories that a different URL would be used for each category. If the same URL is used as with your store, my problem is solved. I will check that out.Thank you very much!
Kelly
-
Hi Kelly,
I am much more familiar with Volusion and 3Dcart, but I imagine that Big Commerce might work in a similar way. Inside the admin panel, when you are building products and categories, it is very easy to assign one product to multiple categories. As CleverPhd suggests, this is accomplished because the products aren't nested under category directories, they have their own.
Here is an example of one of the 3dcart stores I manage. This product: https://www.celebratecommunion.com/prefilled-communion-cups-with-wafers-box-of-500.html actually belongs to 3 different categories: "Prefilled Communion Cups" "Communion Supplies" "Home Page Specials" However, it retains the same URL across all categories. In both 3dcart and Volusion, when you are building a product you can customize the URL and then simply select with drop down boxes which categories you want that product to be applied to. I imagines Big Commerce would be quite similar, but having never used it I can't say for sure. As long as the URL for the product page doesn't change, you could put it in 100's of categories and it would never be considered duplicate content because it only has one unique URL.
I hope that helps a little. Let me know if my answer raises more questions than it answers
Dana
-
See the URL examples above. Basically dont nest product pages under sub categories or category folders.
-
Hello,
Thank you for responding to my question.
I'm not sure what you mean by this....."completely separate your product URLs from your category URLs". My level of knowledge isn't advanced.
-
You should separate your paginated product list pages from your product pages (as far as the URL structure) or only use main categories in the URLs for products.
Consider these example product list pages. You have your main list of products
Then you have pages 2-n that lets people browse products
domain.com/category1/sub1/page2-n
You could have other examples of this (your example would be)
domain.com/category1/sub2/page2-n
In your example, you have a product that can go in sub1 or sub2 and so you dont want
domain.com/category1/sub1/product-abc
domain.com/category1/sub2/product-abc
as yes - these would be duplicates and cause issues. Yes you could use the canonical to link to the main product, but what would work better is this
domain.com/category1/product-abc
If you get rid of the subcategory in the URLs you can take advantage of having the KW from the main category etc. Likewise, if you had a product that could sit in multiple main categories, then it may be you need to use a the approach of
domain.com/products/products-abc
and just completely separate your product URLs from your category URLs.
It would seem that with the use of photographs you will need to always have multiple categories and so this may be your best approach.
You need to sit down with a big whiteboard and map all of this out as it will get complicated real quick. Then run all your products through it and see if it makes sense.
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
-
Finding a specific link - Duplicating my own content
Hi Mozzers, This may be a bit of a n00b question and i feel i should know the answer but alas, here i am asking. I have a page www.website.co.uk/page/ and im getting a duplicate page report of www.website.co.uk/Page/ i know this is because somewhere on my website a link will exists using the capitalised version. I have tried everything i can think of to find it but with no luck, any little tricks? I could always rewrite the urls to lowercase, but I have downloadable software etc also on the website that i dont want to take the capitals out of. So the best solution seems to be finding the link and remove it. Most link checkers I use treat the capitalised and non capitalised as the same thing so really arent helping lol.
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Content Duplication - Zencart
Hi Guys !!! Based on crawler results, it shows that I have 188 duplicate content pages, out of which some are those in which I am not able to understand where the duplication is ??? The page created is unique. All the URL's are static, all titles, metat tags are unique. How do I remove this duplication !!! I am using Zencart as a platform. Thanks in advance for the help !!! 🙂
Technical SEO | | sidjain4you0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Affiliate urls and duplicate content
Hi, What is the best way to get around having an affiliate program, and the affiliate links on your site showing as duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Memoz0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Is using a customer quote on multiple pages duplicate content?
Is there any risk with placing the same customer quote (3-4 sentences) on multiple pages on your site?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
A site I am working with has multiple duplicate content issues.
A reasonably large ecommerce site I am working with has multiple duplicate content issues. On 4 or 5 keyword domains related to site content the owners simply duplicated the home page with category links pushing visitors to the category pages of the main site. There was no canonical URL instruction, so have set preferred url via webmaster tools but now need to code this into the website itself. For a reasonably large ecommerce site, how would you approach that particular nest of troubles. That's even before we get to grips with the on page duplication and wrong keywords!
Technical SEO | | SkiBum0 -
Duplicate content
I am getting flagged for duplicate content, SEOmoz is flagging the following as duplicate: www.adgenerator.co.uk/ www.adgenerator.co.uk/index.asp These are obviously meant to be the same path so what measures do I take to let the SE's know that these are to be considered the same page. I have used the canonical meta tag on the Index.asp page.
Technical SEO | | IPIM0