Problems with ecommerce filters causing duplicate content.
-
We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site.
We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this?
We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue;
-
adding "no index" to all filtered pages
-
making the filters uncrawble using javascript
Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?
-
-
Thank you both Lesley & Jim!
This tool is exactly what we needed! Fingers crossed now we have resolved the issues we had with all that duplicate content.
How long has the parameter tool been available?? I never even knew it existed!
-
Check your Google Webmaster Tools and see if you need to use the Parameter tool. There are settings there that you can use to tell google not to index parameters. You can also confirm that Google is not under-indexing your site, in which case you don't have to worry about the parametered URLs at all. If you have canonical tags in place that will do the trick.
-
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
-
Fix Duplicate Content Before Migration?
My client has 2 Wordpress sites (A and B). Each site is 20 pages, with similar site structures, and 12 of the pages on A having nearly 100% duplicate content with their counterpart on B. I am not sure to what extent A and/or B is being penalized for this. In 2 weeks (July 1) the client will execute a rebrand, renaming the business, launching C, and taking down A and B. Individual pages on A and B will be 301 redirected to their counterpart on C. C will have a similar site structure to A and B. I expect the content will be freshened a bit, but may initially be very similar to the content on A and B. I have 3 questions: Given that only 2 weeks remain before the switchover - is there any purpose in resolving the duplicate content between A and B prior to taking them down? Will 301 redirects from penalized pages on A or B actually hurt the ranking of the destination page on C? If a page on C has the same content as its predecessor on A or B, could it be penalized for that, even though the page on A or B has since been taken down and replaced with a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | futumara0 -
Please provide solution for my website? Duplicate content Problem
I have 2 Domains with the same name with same content. How to solve that problem? Do I need to change the content from my main website. My Hosting is having different plans, but with the same features. So many pages were having the same content, and it is not possible to change the content, what is the solution for that? Please let me know how to solve that issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexa.Hill0 -
How to avoid duplicate content with e-commerce and multiple stores?
We are currently developing an e-commerce platform that will feed multiple stores. Each store will have its own domain and URL, but all stores will offer products that come from the same centralized database. That means all products will have the same image, description and title across all stores. What would be the best practice to avoid getting stores penalized for duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agence_Bunji0 -
Will Nofollow in Nav Cause a Problem?
I have seen conflicting information regarding the use of rel=nofollow on internal links, but the gist of it seems to be that it's not a good idea. The top linked page on a particular site is a consultation page. Contact is not far behind. Both are linked from the header and footer or sidebar. At first, I thought no-following them would be the perfect solution. After what I've read, it seems I need to remove some of the instances of linking instead of nofollowing. Any e firsthand experience or feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Duplicate Titles caused by multiple variations of same URL
Hi. Can you please advise how I can overcome this issue. Moz.com crawle is indicating I have 100's of Duplicate Title tag errors. However this is caused because many URL's have been indexed multiple times in Google. For example. www.abc.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adhunna
www.abc.com/?b=123 www.abc.com/ www.abc.com/?b=654 www.abc.com/?b=875 www.abc.com/index.html What can I do to stop this issue being reported as duplictae Titles, as well as content? I was thinking maybe I can use Robots.txt to block various query string parameters. I'm Open to ideas and examples.0 -
Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?
Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action. I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings. If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index? The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update. The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text. As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update. One last question: The page completely dropped from the search index. If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position? If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0 -
Can you be penalized by a development server with duplicate content?
I developed a site for another company late last year and after a few months of seo done by them they were getting good rankings for hundreds of keywords. When penguin hit they seemed to benefit and had many top 3 rankings. Then their rankings dropped one day early May. Site is still indexed and they still rank for their domain. After some digging they found the development server had a copy of the site (not 100% duplicate). We neglected to hide the site from the crawlers, although there were no links built and we hadn't done any optimization like meta descriptions etc. The company was justifiably upset. We contacted Google and let them know the site should not have been indexed, and asked they reconsider any penalties that may have been placed on the original site. We have not heard back from them as yet. I am wondering if this really was the cause of the penalty though. Here are a few more facts: Rankings built during late March / April on an aged domain with a site that went live in December. Between April 14-16 they lost about 250 links, mostly from one domain. They acquired those links about a month before. They went from 0 to 1130 links between Dec and April, then back to around 870 currently According to ahrefs.com they went from 5 ranked keywords in March to 200 in April to 800 in May, now down to 500 and dropping (I believe their data lags by at least a couple of weeks). So the bottom line is this site appeared to have suddenly ranked well for about a month then got hit with a penalty and are not in top 10 pages for most keywords anymore. I would love to hear any opinions on whether a duplicate site that had no links could be the cause of this penalty? I have read there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se. I am of the (amateur) opinion that it may have had more to do with the quick sudden rise in the rankings triggering something. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmsmall0 -
Duplicate content for images
On SEOmoz I am getting duplicate errors for my onsite report. Unfortunately it does not specify what that content is... We are getting these errors for our photo gallery and i am assuming that the reason is some of the photos are listed in multiple categories. Can this be the problem? what else can it be? how can we resolve these issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0