Avoiding Duplicate Content - Same Product Under Different Categories
-
Hello, I am taking some past advise and cleaning up my content navigation to only show 7 tabs as opposed to the 14 currently showing at www.enchantingquotes.com. I am creating a "Shop by Room" and "Shop by Category" link, which is what my main competitors do. My concern is the duplicate content that will happen since the same item will appear in both categories. Should I no follow the "Shop by Room" page? I am confused as to when I should use a no follow as opposed to a canonical tag? Thank you so much for any advise!
-
It helps tremendously. Thank you so very much!
-
You need it in the head on each page that is a duplicate and pointing to the "original" page or the page you want indexed.
I'll just grab the same example from the help page -
Lets say you had some products that were the same -
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234567&sort=alpha&sessionid=5678asfasdfasfd http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234567&sort=price&sessionid=5678asfasdfasfd
We would put the following on the duplicate pages -
So in your case you may want to put it in your "shop by room" etc. category pointing towards "shop by category" (or visa versa)
this would then tell Google to only index one of the tabs (either room or category tab) and the other is a duplicate.Hope that helps a bit. You can always take a look in the Google guide if you need a bit more help.
-
I'm sorry to bother again...but do I need to add the canonical tag to each product or will just once to the main category page suffice? Thanks
-
Thank you so much for clearing this up for me. You've been a huge help and I appreciate it so much.
-
There used to be a thought that you could horde all your link juice internally but in reality its not worth it. You could no follow the link to the duplicate page and hope that the majority of any links go to the correct page but if rel=canonical any link juice will go the correct place.
In short if you've set up rel=canonical make the rest of the site for users and the rest will come. Endorsing may not have been the best descriptive wording. Any questions let me know ill do my best to explain further. (you can also take a look at the "no follow" link above for more info.
-
I really appreciate this help - one last question, I am a bit confused about the link juice. I thought I would not want to pass link juice to these duplicate pages, but instead it looks like it is okay because it shows I am endorsing the pages? Thank you
-
-
Awesome - thank you SOOOO much, Chris!
-
Hello Cindy,
To stop the duplicate content use the rel=canonical tag it will then tell Google this is the original content and Google will then only index one of the tabs.
No follow is telling Google that you do not want to let "link juice" flow through that link and you're not really endoursing the link.
Rel=canonical is telling Google you have duplicate content but one of them is the original or the single on you want to be indexed.
Good luck.
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
-
Can I use duplicate content in different US cities without hurting SEO?
So, I have major concerns with this plan. My company has hundreds of facilities located all over the country. Each facility has it's own website. We have a third party company working to build a content strategy for us. What they came up with is to create a bank of content specific to each service line. If/when any facility offers that service, they then upload the content for that service line to that facility website. So in theory, you might have 10-12 websites all in different cities, with the same content for a service. They claim "Google is smart, it knows its content all from the same company, and because it's in different local markets, it will still rank." My contention is that duplicate content is duplicate content, and unless it is "localize" it, Google is going to prioritize one page of it and the rest will get very little exposure in the rankings no matter where you are. I could be wrong, but I want to be sure we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot with this strategy, because it is a major major undertaking and too important to go off in the wrong direction. SEO Experts, your help is genuinely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Could this be seen as duplicate content in Google's eyes?
Hi I'm an in-house SEO and we've recently seen Panda related traffic loss along with some of our main keywords slipping down the SERPs. Looking for possible Panda related issues I was wondering if the following could be seen as duplicate content. We've got some very similar holidays (travel company) on our website. While they are different I'm concerned it may be seen as creating content that is too similar: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/the-wildlife-and-beaches-of-kenya.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/ultimate-kenya-wildlife-and-beaches.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/wildlife-and-beach-family-safari.aspx They do all have unique text but as you can see from the titles, they are very similar (note from an SEO point of view the tabbed content is all within the same page at source level). At the top level of the holiday pages we have a filtered search:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays.aspx These pages have a unique introduction but the content snippets being pulled into the boxes is drawn from each of the individual holiday pages. I'm just concerned that these could be introducing some duplicating issues. Any thoughts?0 -
Different website is shown when searched for content
Hello, Have any body experienced this situation, When i take a content from http://www.creativethemes.net e.g. from home page and search it on google, search results shows FMEextensions with that content. FME had never ever used that data, it can not be found in sources files either, also this data was never written and placed on FME site but it is shown with FME How can this happen and what do you suggest to resolve it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Does having a page that ends with ? cause duplicate content?
I am working on a site that has lots of dynamic parameters. So lets say we have www.example.com/page?parameter=1 When the page has no parameters you can still end up at www.example.com/page? Should I redirect this to www.example.com/page/ ? Im not sure if Google ignores this, or if these pages need to be dealt with. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Is an RSS feed considered duplicate content?
I have a large client with satellite sites. The large site produces many news articles and they want to put an RSS feed on the satellite sites that will display the articles from the large site. My question is, will the rss feeds on the satellite sites be considered duplicate content? If yes, do you have a suggestion to utilize the data from the large site without being penalized? If no, do you have suggestions on what tags should be used on the satellite pages? EX: wrapped in tags? THANKS for the help. Darlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXeSEO0 -
Duplicate content across internation urls
We have a large site with 1,000+ pages of content to launch in the UK. Much of this content is already being used on a .nz url which is going to stay. Do you see this as an issue or do you thin Google will take localised factoring into consideration. We could add a link from the NZ pages to the UK. We cant noindex the pages as this is not an option. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide0 -
Having a hard time with duplicate page content
I'm having a hard time redirecting website.com/ to website.com The crawl report shows both versions as duplicate content. Here is my htaccess: RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cgman
RewriteBase /
#Rewrite bare to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mywebsite.com
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index.php$ http://www.mywebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [NC,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.localhost$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L] I added the last 2 lines after seeing a Q&A here, but I don't think it has helped.0 -
Duplicate block of text on category listings
Fellows, We are deciding whether we should include our category description on all pages of the category listing - for example; page 1, page 2, page 3... The category description is currently a few paragraphs of text that sits on page 1 of the category only at present. It also includes an image (linked to a large version of it) with appropriate ALT text. Would we benefit from including this introductory text on the rest of the pages in the category? Or should we leave it on the first page only? Would it flag up duplicate signals? Ideas please! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640