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=5678asfasdfasfdWe 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
-
Identifying Duplicate Content
Hi looking for tools (beside Copyscape or Grammarly) which can scan a list of URLs (e.g. 100 pages) and find duplicate content quite quickly. Specifically, small batches of duplicate content, see attached image as an example. Does anyone have any suggestions? Cheers. 5v591k.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
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 -
All Thin Content removed and duplicate content replaced. But still no success?
Good morning, Over the last three months i have gone about replacing and removing all the duplicate content (1000+ page) from our site top4office.co.uk. Now it been just under 2 months since we made all the changes and we still are not showing any improvements in the SERPS. Can anyone tell me why we aren't making any progress or spot something we are not doing correctly? Another problem is that although we have removed 3000+ pages using the removal tool searching site:top4office.co.uk still shows 2800 pages indexed (before there was 3500). Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, So I have my great content (that contains a link to our site) that I want to distribute to high quality relevant sites in my niche as part of a link building campaign. Can I distribute this to lots of sites? The reason I ask is that those sites will then have duplicate content to all the other sites I distribute the content to won;t they? I this duplication bad for them and\or us? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
How to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues with Google?
We have 1000s of audio book titles at our Web store. Google's Panda de-valued our site some time ago because, I believe, of duplicate content. We get our descriptions from the publishers which means a good
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen
deal of our description pages are the same as the publishers = duplicate content according to Google. Although re-writing each description of the products we offer is a daunting, almost impossible task, I am thinking of re-writing publishers' descriptions using The Best Spinner software which allows me to replace some of the publishers' words with synonyms. I have re-written one audio book title's description resulting in 8% unique content from the original in 520 words. I did a CopyScape Check and it reported "65 duplicates." CopyScape appears to be reporting duplicates of words and phrases within sentences and paragraphs. I see very little duplicate content of full sentences
or paragraphs. Does anyone know whether Google's duplicate content algorithm is the same or similar to CopyScape's? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from CopyScape's duplicate content algorithm? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from Google's duplicate content algorithm?0 -
Showing Duplicate Content in Webmaster Tools.
About 6 weeks ago we completely redid our entire site. The developer put in 302 redirects. We were showing thousands of duplicate meta descriptions and titles. I had the redirects changed to 301. For a few weeks the duplicates slowly went down and now they are right back to where they started. Isn't the point of 301 redirects to show Google that content has permanently been moved? Why is it not picking this up? I knew it would take some time but I am right where I started after a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0