Duplicate on page content - Product descriptions - Should I Meta NOINDEX?
-
Hi,
Our e-commerce store has a lot of product descriptions duplicated - Some of them are default manufacturer descriptions, some are descriptions because the colour of the product varies - so essentially the same product, just different colour.
It is going to take a lot of man hours to get the unique content in place - would a Meta No INDEX on the dupe pages be ok for the moment and then I can lift that once we have unique content in place?
I can't 301 or canonicalize these pages, as they are actually individual products in their own right, just dupe descriptions.
Thanks,
Ben
-
So, a meta "no-index, follow" tag would be the best advise, here?
-
Hi Chris,
Is it possible to only give the duplicate product description a noindex tag? So the product page can still be shown/rank in the search engine based on an unique page title, meta description, etc.?
-
Noindexing them is a good way to go--especially if you have a high number and high percentage of pages with duplicate content.
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
-
Content Strategy/Duplicate Content Issue, rel=canonical question
Hi Mozzers: We have a client who regularly pays to have high-quality content produced for their company blog. When I say 'high quality' I mean 1000 - 2000 word posts written to a technical audience by a lawyer. We recently found out that, prior to the content going on their blog, they're shipping it off to two syndication sites, both of which slap rel=canonical on them. By the time the content makes it to the blog, it has probably appeared in two other places. What are some thoughts about how 'awful' a practice this is? Of course, I'm arguing to them that the ranking of the content on their blog is bound to be suffering and that, at least, they should post to their own site first and, if at all, only post to other sites several weeks out. Does anyone have deeper thinking about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Displaying Long Product Descriptions on Mobile
Hello, One of our clients has a website which sells health products and supplements. All of the products have detailed descriptions that include ingredients information, usage, supplements facts, detailed information on how the products affect you, a detailed guarantee and FAQs. Our client would like to display a more synthesised product description on mobile devices. This would be a shortened description which would make it easier for people to understand what the benefits of the products are. At the moment we still have the previously developed 'Read Product Description' button that expands and reveals more text. We need to remove this and display a different shortened description but still follow Google's best practices. If the content on the mobile differs from the website, will it have a detrimental effect on the website's ranking in Google? If this is so, we face a barrier when trying to create a summarised version of the website for mobiles. Had anyone had a similar experience? If so, please advise on what the best approach would be for this to maintain a high ranking in Google, but display differing content across platforms. Much appreciated,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OptimiseWeb
Gabriel0 -
Having problems resolving duplicate meta descriptions
Recently, I’ve recommended to the team running one of our websites that we remove duplicate meta descriptions. The site currently has a large number of these and we’d like to conform to SEO best practice. I’ve seen Matt Cutt’s recent video entitled, ‘Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description’, where he suggests that webmasters use meta descriptions for their most tactically important pages, but that it is better to have no meta description than duplicates. The website currently has one meta description that is duplicated across the entire site. This seemed like a relatively straight forward suggestion but it is proving much more challenging to implement over a large website. The site’s developer has tried to resolve the meta descriptions, but says that the current meta description is a site wide value. It is possible to create 18 distinct replacements for 18 ‘template’ pages, but any sub-pages of these will inherit the value and create more duplicates. Would it be better to: Have no meta descriptions at all across the site? Stick with the status quo and have one meta description site-wide? Make 18 separate meta descriptions for the 18 most important pages, but still have 18 sets of duplicates across the sub-pages of the site. Or…is there a solution to this problem which would allow us to follow the best practice in Matt’s video? Any help would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Product descriptions & Duplicate Content: between fears and reality
Hello everybody, I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc). What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site... what do you think? Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ? Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Duplicate blog content and NOINDEX
Suppose the "Home" page of your blog at www.example.com/domain/ displays your 10 most recent posts. Each post has its own permalink page (where you have comments/discussion, etc.). This obviously means that the last 10 posts show up as duplicates on your site. Is it good practice to use NOINDEX, FOLLOW on the blog root page (blog/) so that only one copy gets indexed? Thanks, Akira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahirai0 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content
We have recently moved our company's blog to Wordpress on a subdomain (we utilize the Yoast SEO plugin). We are now experiencing an ever-growing volume of crawl errors (nearly 300 4xx now) for pages that do not exist to begin with. I believe it may have something to do with having the blog on a subdomain and/or our yoast seo plugin's indexation archives (author, category, etc) --- we currently have Subpages of archives and taxonomies, and category archives in use. I'm not as familiar with Wordpress and the Yoast SEO plugin as I am with other CMS' so any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. I can PM further info if necessary. Thank you for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BethA0 -
Canonical Not Fixing Duplicate Content
I added a canonical tag to the home page last month, but I am still showing duplicate content for the home page. Here is the tag I added: What am I missing? Duplicate-Content.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InnoInsulation0 -
Duplicate Content On A Subdomain
Hi, We have a client who is currently close to completing a site specifically aimed at the UK market (they're doing this in-house so we've had no say in how it will work). The site will almost be a duplicate (in terms of content, targeted keywords etc.) of a section of the main site (that sits on the root domain) - the main site is targeted toward the US. The only difference will be certain spellings and currency type. If this new UK site were to sit on a sub domain of the main site, which is a .com, will this cause duplicate content issues? I know that there wouldn't be an issue if the new site were to be on a separate .co.uk domain (according to Matt Cutts), but it looks like the client wants it to be on a sub domain. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasarrow0