Are the duplicate content and 302 redirects errors negatively affecting ranking in my client's OS Commerce site?
-
I am working on an OS Commerce site and struggling to get it to rank even for the domain name. Moz is showing a huge number of 302 redirects and duplicate content issues but the web developer claims they can not fix those because ‘that is how the software in which your website is created works’. Have you any experience of OS Commerce? Is it the 302 redirects and duplicate content errors negatively affecting the ranking?
-
Hi Chris,
There are 1259 temporary (302) redirects (the web designer has a problem changing them to 301 redirects and so has left the site like that). These redirects all point to the same page - the log-in page - (as one can not write reviews on products unless logged in). I am concerned that this may look like spam behavior and may be negatively affecting ranking.
I feel it is up to the web designer to complete the site (and remove the 302s) however the web designer considers their job complete. I am trying to decide weather to take on the challenge and try to sort out the site in osCommerce (of which I have no experience) or weather it is better to start a WordPress blog on a fresh domain to attract traffic until the site owner is ready to rewrite the site in a more SEO friendly format. Currently the site is indexed but will not rank for even the company name.
Thanks so much for you help.
Alison
-
I would need to know more about the nature of the redirects to be able to say whether they would cause you any problems. If they are chained, you will run into issues mentioned by Matt Cutts in this video. Google has many signals to tell which sites are considered spam, and if you use the canonical references and have good quality content, I can't imagine redirects causing any red flags for your site.
Regards,
Chris
-
Hi Chris,
That sounds great I had not seen that add on I will see if that helps. Do you think if I expend the time and effort to solve the duplicate content issues then the 301 redirects will not cause any problems or do you think they are causing Google to think the site is spammy?
Alison
-
Hi Alison,
I'm not too familiar with osCommerce but there appear to be plugins allowing for canonical tags (http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/6578) that you might want to recommend to the designer. Having the same product for different colors and sizes is a great use for the canonical tag, and my suggestion would be to designate the most popular color/size as the canonical version. As for the duplicate content issues, I'm afraid my inexperience with osCommerce prevents me from giving any additional insight into that aspect of your problem.
For the redirects, if the pages being 302 redirected do not have many links pointing to them, the 302 redirects shouldn't be a problem. You should focus on the canonical tags for now.
Regards,
Chris
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks so much for your response.
The web designer has a problem applying 301 redirects and canonicalisation in osCommerce and I have limited experience osComerce. I do not want to waste time & clients money working on SEO (link building etc) when the site will not even rank for the domain name or exact product searches. I think the problems are more fundamental and lie in the design/implementation of the site. Crawl results show pages crawled 2,732, 250 Duplicate pages (same product in different colors / sizes etc), 1259 Temporary redirects. Do you think the duplicate pages are the problem or will it be the 302 redirects? Or is it both? Should I add more quality content ie a blog to this domain in the hope of getting the rankings and traffic up or start the blog on a separate new domain away from these issues?
Any experience of SEO in osCommerce?
Alison
-
The duplicate content is an issue if there are many versions of the same page on the site. You may be able to mitigate some of the negative impact from this by designating one as the canonical version, but ideally you would want to 301 redirect the duplicate pages to the one that has built the highest pagerank.
As for the 302 redirects, I am under the impression that the redirects themselves will not hurt you, but any links to the pages that are being redirected will not pass link juice along to the redirect destination, whereas a 301 redirect would pass a large portion of that link juice (some still leaks even with a 301 redirect).
Hope that helps,
Chris Wilson
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
-
Redirects and site map isn't showing
We had a malware hack and spent 3 days trying to get Bluehost to fix things. Since they have made changes 2 things are happening: 1. Our .xml sitemap cannot be created https://www.caffeinemarketing.co.uk/sitmap.xml we have tried external tools 2. We had 301 redirects from the http (www and non www versions) nad the https;// (non www version) throughout the whole website to https://www.caffeinemarketing.co.uk/ and subsequent pages Whilst the redirects seem to be happening, when you go into the tools such as https://httpstatus.io every version of every page is a 200 code only whereas before ther were showing the 301 redirects Have Bluehost messed things up? Hope you can help thanks
Technical SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
404 Error Pages being picked up as duplicate content
Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kfallconnect0 -
Google's ability to crawl AJAX rendered content
I would like to make a change to the way our main navigation is currently rendered on our e-commerce site. Currently, all of the content that appears when you click a navigation category is rendering on page load. This is currently a large portion of every page visit’s bandwidth and even the images are downloaded even if a user doesn’t choose to use the navigation. I’d like to change it so the content appears and is downloaded only IF the user clicks on it, I'm planning on using AJAX. As that is the case it wouldn’t not be automatically on the site(which may or may not mean Google would crawl it). As we already provide a sitemap.xml for Google I want to make sure this change would not adversely affect our SEO. As of October this year the Webmaster AJAX crawling doc. suggestions has been depreciated. While the new version does say that its crawlers are smart enough to render AJAX content, something I've tested, I'm not sure if that only applies to content injected on page load as opposed to in click like I'm planning to do.
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
How do sites manage to rank better with no fresh content
hi, trying to work out why there are lots of sites that are ranking better than me. Our site www.in2town.co.uk has always been on the first page and for a long time we were number one in google for the term lifestyle magazine as well as being on the first page for other keywords. Our site is www.in2town.co.uk We had a site upgrade a few months ago and since then we have seen our rankings have dropped like a lead balloon. I do not understand why sites such as the following seem to rank better than me for the word lifestyle magazine http://www.lifestyle.org/ http://www.24sevenlifestyle.com/ http://www.lifestylesmagazine.com/website/ http://motabilitylifestyle.co.uk/ http://www.alifestylemagazine.com/ if anyone can help me understand what i am doing wrong and why my rankings have gone out of the window then it would be a huge help.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
404's and duplicate content.
I have real estate based websites that add new pages when new listings are added to the market and then deletes pages when the property is sold. My concern is that there are a significant amount of 404's created and the listing pages that are added are going to be the same as others in my market who use the same IDX provider. I can go with a different IDX provider that uses IFrame which doesn't create new pages but I used a IFrame before and my time on site was 3min w/ 2.5 pgs per visit and now it's 7.5 pg/visit with 6+min on the site. The new pages create new content daily so is fresh content and better on site metrics (with the 404's) better or less 404's, no dup content and shorter onsite metrics better? Any thoughts on this issue? Any advice would be appreciated
Technical SEO | | AnthonyLasVegas0 -
How to fix 404 (Client Error) errors in wordpress blog?
hey A very quick question...after analyzed my wp blog I've found "34" 404 (Client Error) Errors and I don't know how to fix it, do you know how?? *I renew html code of 404 of my wordpress blog.
Technical SEO | | akitmane1