How should I manage duplicate content caused by a guided navigation for my e-commerce site?
-
I am working with a company which uses Endeca to power the guided navigation for our e-commerce site. I am concerned that the duplicate content generated by having the same products served under numerous refinement levels is damaging the sites ability to rank well, and was hoping the Moz community could help me understand how much of an impact this type of duplicate content could be having. I also would love to know if there are any best practices for how to manage this type of navigation. Should I nofollow all of the URLs which have more than 1 refinement used on a category, or should I allow the search engines to go deeper than that to preserve the long tail? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
-
This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much you have really helped me out.
-
Hi there,
My former agency has a good post on pagination that you might find useful: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html
You definitely want to cut down on duplicate content as much as possible - let me know if that post does the trick for the ecommerce question!
Cheers
-
Hi David,
I would like to give you an article at hand:
Maybe you noticed it already? It
s hard to give you a recommendation for the refinement levels... in general I would advise you to be very careful with that... to me it sounds not so bad what youve done so far... -
You are absolutely right about nofollow overuse being a trust factor. I had not thought about that aspect of this issue, and thank you for bringing it up. In regards to using canonical and rel prev / next, I am not sure what an implementation of this would look like. I added in rel canonical pointing to the www version of the page URL without any unnecessary parameters, and I am familiar with the idea of having a "Show All" page so as to avoid pagination (we added in our pagination parameters into Google Webmaster Tools instead). Would you recommend using canonical to roll up results pages to a category and parent refinement level, and if so how many refinements would you recommend before drawing the line?
Thank you again,
David
-
The only differentiation (if there is any) you can make when it comes up to DC is between partial and "normal" DC... keep in mind that any type (!!!) of DC won`t do your site any good! Avoid DC whenever and wherever you can! Under all circumstances... I do not know Endeca but dealing with DC caused by a navigational structure is a serious problem, especially within a shop system.
There are differnt ways to fight DC or to confine it... most common is rel=prev/next or rel=canonical... these are alternatives and never perfect solutions but there are lots of scenarios where this is a big help.
I would be careful with follow and nofollow... if you let the robot follow everything this might lead to lots of errors in the scenario you describe but on the other hand setting many URLs to nofollow can also harm your site because it`s not a very trustworthy signal for Google
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 From a Large Guide that will be released in sections
Hey Mozzers, Please Help! My new client has a blogger who is writing a multi-part series for them and releasing one part each week. Each part is about 500 words. I know that longer, in depth content generally provides better user signals like "dwell time" and even social shares....but i have to balance this with the fact that the client wants to publish one new post a week for SEO and to give users a reason to come back to the website. Should i just wait a while and combine the posts, using a 301 to redirect all the small posts to the big one? Thanks in advance, Nails
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matt.nails0 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Duplicate content hidden behind tabs
Just looking at an ecommerce website and they've hidden their product page's duplicate content behind tabs on the product pages - not on purpose, I might add. Is this a legitimate way to hide duplicate content, now that Google has lowered the importance and crawlability of content hidden behind tabs? Is this a legitimate tactic to tackle duplicate content? Your thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
E-Commerce Mobile Pagination Dillema
Hi Everybody, I'm managing the SEO for an E-commerce site with different desktop and mobile sites (meaning, not responsive). We're changing the way reviews on mobile product pages will be displayed from 'view all' to pagination (due to server load). Basically the above the fold part of the page will always display the product, and below the fold will have x numbers of reviews on each page. But here is where it gets tricky: 1 - A different number of review pages will exist on mobile vs desktop (due to different no. of reviews per page on each device) - so I'm wondering what's the solution regarding canonicals. Usually every mobile page points to its desktop parallel, but now we'll have non-matching pages. 2 - The users will be able to change the no. of reviews displayed on each page. So the number of paginated pages will change accordingly. I was thinking about a solution where all the reviews will be in the first page's html (and only X of them will be displayed on screen), and all the other paginated pages will be created dynamically (with # and won't be indexed, so basically no pagination in mobile). Does anyone think this can be seen as cloaking or has any other thoughts? Thanks, Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don340 -
Duplicate Multi-site Content, Duplicate URLs
We have 2 ecommerce sites that are 95% identical. Both sites carry the same 2000 products, and for the most part, have the identical product descriptions. They both have a lot of branded search, and a considerable amount of domain authority. We are in the process of changing out product descriptions so that they are unique. Certain categories of products rank better on one site than another. When we've deployed unique product descriptions on both sites, we've been able to get some double listings on Page 1 of the SERPs. The categories on the sites have different names, and our URL structure is www.domain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name.cfm. So even though the product names are the same, the URLs are different including the category names. We are in the process of flattening our URL structures, eliminating the category and subcategory names from the product URLs: www.domain.com/product-name.cfm. The upshot is that the product URLs will be the same. Is that going to cause us any ranking issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
How would you suggest finding content topics for this site?
Hello, How would you suggest finding content topics for this site: nlpca.com The end goal is signups for training seminars in San Francisco, California and Salt Lake City, Utah. In the future the seminars will move more towards life coaching trainings but right now they are mostly about NLP. NLP is a personal development field. Just looking for ideas for the process of finding topics for the most link-bait-heavy fabulous content. The owners of the site are authorities in the field. This is for both blog and article content. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Scraping / Duplicate Content Question
Hi All, I understanding the way to protect content such as a feature rich article is to create authorship by linking to your Google+ account. My Question
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
You have created a webpage that is informative but not worthy to be an article, hence no need create authorship in Google+
If a competitor comes along and steals this content word for word, something similar, creates their own Google+ page, can you be penalised? Is there any way to protect yourself without authorship and Google+? Regards Mark0 -
Duplicate Content on Blog
I have a blog I'm setting up. I would like to have a mini-about block set up on every page that gives very brief information about me and my blog, as well as a few links to the rest of the site and some social sharing options. I worry that this will get flagged as duplicate content because a significant amount of my pages will contain the same information at the top of the page, front and center. Is there anything I can do to address this? Is it as much of a concern as I am making it? Should I work on finding some javascript/ajax method for loading that content into the page dynamically only for normal browser pageviews? Any thoughts or help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0