Nice looking ecommerce menus with featured product categories - bad for SEO due to duplicate content?
-
My ecommerce website has menus which contain 'featured product sub-categories'. These are shown alongside the other product sub-category links. Each 'featured product category' includes a link, an image (with link) and some text.
All menu content is visible to search engines.
These menus look nice and probably encourage CTR (not tested!) but are they bad for SEO?
-
Thanks, I think I'll just leave these for now as it's only three sub categories that have the 'tripling up' of links. Appreciate you both taking the time to reply.
-
Hello Coraltoes,
I would not rely on a nofollow attribute for those links. Instead, you could approach this in several different ways...
#1. Don't worry about it. If you're talking about an extra few links it really isn't going to make that big of a difference, though the text link should probably be first since it has the best anchor text.
#2. Remove them and rely on sub-navigation in the sidebar for sending people to the "featured" section of each category.
#3. Put the Featured fly-out navigation in javascript, while keeping the rest of the main navigation in HTML/CSS.
#4. Sometimes it is possible to wrap a single href tag around an image AND text, which would cut the superfluous links in half.
If you discuss these options with your developers perhaps some other ideas will come to light as well.
Good luck!
-
I may be relying on out-of-date information. I read about this here
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-situations-where-you-should-use-nofollow-for-linking/6361/
-
Thanks for the reply.
Yes, the same link is displayed three times in the navigation menu (so two repeats)! There are 3 of these featured menu items in total.
I thought the official line from Google was no to nofollows for internal links? Has this changed?
-
Are you saying that you have the same link displayed multiple times in your navigation menu? If so, you should probably rel="nofollow" the duplicates.
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
-
Should I be worried about our 'Duplicate' content
Hi guys... I've just been working through some issues to give our site a little cleanup. I'm working through our duplicate content issues (we have some legitimate duplicate pages that need removing, and some of our dynamic content is problematic. Are web developers are going to sort with canonical tags this week.) However... There are some pages that are actually different products, but are very similar pages that are 'triggering' MOZ to say we have duplicate pages. Here an example... http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/filofax-refills/filo-12-month-inserts-personal-size/fortnight-view-filofax-personal and http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/filofax-refills/filo-12-month-inserts-personal-size/week-to-a-view-filofax-personal They are very similar refill products, it's just the diary format is different. Question: Should I be worried about this? I've never seen our rankings change in the past when 'cleaning up' duplicate content. What do you guys think? Isaac.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Duplicate content errors
I have multiple duplicate content errors in my crawl diagnostics. The problem is though that i already took care of these problems with the canonical tag but MOZ keeps saying there is a problem. For example this page http://www.letspump.dk/produkter/56-aminosyre/ has a canonical tag, but moz still says it has an error. Why is that?
On-Page Optimization | | toejklemme0 -
Content with changing URL and duplicate content
Hi everyone, I have a question regarding content (user reviews), that are changing URL all the time. We get a lot of reviews from users that have been dining at our partner restaurants, which get posted on our site under (new) “reviews”. My worry however is that the URL for these reviews is changing all the time. The reason for this is that they start on page 1, and then get pushed down to page 2, and so on when new reviews come in. http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser I’m guessing that this could cause for serious indexing problems? I can see in google that some reviews are indexed multiple times with different URLs, and some are not indexed at all. We further more have the specific reviews under each restaurant profile. I’m not sure if this could be considered duplicate content? Maybe we should tell google not to index the “new reviews section” by using robots.txt. We don’t get much traffic on these URLs anyways, and all reviews are still under each restaurant-profile. Or maybe the canonical tag can be used? I look forward to your input. Cheers, Christian
On-Page Optimization | | Christian_T2 -
How often should I update category and product content to keep it fresh?
I want to keep our site up to date and fresh with content. How often should I update categories and products pages with content? What angel should I take with categories (new products/services etc.) Thanks Craig
On-Page Optimization | | Towelsrus0 -
Photo Gallery with Duplicate Content and Titles
I have a photo Gallery that is coming up as a lot of Duplicate Titles and Page Content and fixing each photo just isn't possible right now. Should I just block the search engines from indexing them to resolve the errors?
On-Page Optimization | | NeilBelliveau0 -
Wordpress SEO. How to add static content above home page posts.
I think I many have some duplicate content issues as have been adding unque content above posts in categories using the all category SEO. How can I add static content to the posts on the home page though? Any help appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Duplicate content from category pages?
I have an ecommerce store with different categories for my products. Some products do appear in more than one category, is that an issue even if you end up on the same product page/link? Also, I have a "show all products" category, which I believe creates duplicate content too? What is your take on this? What can I do to solve this? Is it even an issue of duplicate content? All answers are very much appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | danielpett0 -
Should I worry about duplicate titles on pages where there is paginated content?
LivingThere.com is a real estate search site and many of our content pages are "search result" - ish in that a page often provides all the listings that are available and this may go on for multiple pages. For example, this is a primary page about a building: http://livingthere.com/building/31308-Cocoa-Exchange Because of the number of listings, the listings paginate to a second page: http://livingthere.com/building/31308-Cocoa-Exchange?MListings_page=2 Both pages have the same Page Title. Is this a concern? If so is there a "best practice" for giving paginated content different titles? Thanks! Nate
On-Page Optimization | | nate1230