If I sell custom sticker products and have similar titles, is it a problem?
-
Hi,
We're running a rather new website at www.redrockdecals.com and we sell mainly sticker products. I would just like to clarify on something that is bugging me and I just can't go forward with other products until I know the answers. I'd appreciate the help so much.
-
We sell for example license plate products for different European countries. I have figured out the best title for the page would be for example "Custom Catalonia License Plate" and the primary keyword in this is Catalonia license plate since that's what actually gets some searches from Google and therefore I have used that without the word "custom" in the product description text. I guess it's a good idea to write totally different description texts for all of these license plate pages so that's what I've been doing. Now the question is - does google accept the fact that I have different product titles like Custom Catalonia License Plate, Custom Germany License Plate etc so just the country name differs on all of these pages? Or should I play around with the titles and word orders also?
-
There is one part on the product page where we describe for example the temperature ranges and other specifications about the sticker material as you can see here: http://www.redrockdecals.com/custom-slovakia-license-plate Is it ok to copy-paste that text to all of the pages if the short descriptions on top of the product page are different?
-
-
At a certain point, it becomes extremely difficult to justify expending time on creating quality unique descriptions for individual products unless you can get enough unique reviews specific to each product page. Because of this, you need to make a decision as to whether you think you can keep them indexed. If you do an outstanding job on every other aspect of your site's SEO, you may be able to, however it's not a sure thing even if you do all that other work.
What may be more beneficial is to noindex the individual flame sticker product pages and focus more energy on building trust / ranking signals focused on their category page. There is no "one answer fits all" scenario unfortunately.
As for your Domain Authority, you'll need to speak with a Moz rep for more clarity, however Domain Authority is based on Moz's proprietary formula for understanding overall quality of the full spectrum of SEO signals. So the better you do across the board in each aspect of SEO, the stronger that score will be.
You can learn more about DA on their explanation page.
-
Thank you so much and sorry for the delayed reply. This information means really a lot for me and I am very happy you are taking your time to help me out.
I am already working on the license plate pages and will see how it goes after I have written unique descriptions for all of them. As I understand it's OK if the titles are like Custom Albania License Plate, Custom United Kingdom License Plate etc if I write totally unique descriptions below the H1 title and use the keyword like "albania license plate" throughout the description twice perhaps.
I got two more questions...
-
Any good tips how to optimize or deal with products like this http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-flame-decal-sticker-721 ? The flame decals are actually really similar to each other but they must be presented in a catalog form so I cannot combine them onto a single page with a dropdown or anything like that. And even if I write unique descriptions it's really weird to write totally different titles for them. I wonder if I should just NOINDEX them?
-
Why is our Domain Authority only 20? Is it because of the overall poor optimization? Should it improve if I have half of the pages optimized in a better way?
-
-
I have a preliminary very serious concern about how you've set things up on the site.
Of course, without a full understanding of the entire site, this is JUST preliminary. Yet even at this point, I found issues that say "not likely to get true, sustainable 1st page rankings".
http://www.redrockdecals.com/austria-european-license-plate-sticker-different-sizes-and-materials
http://www.redrockdecals.com/belgium-european-license-plate-sticker-different-sizes-and-materials
The URLs for these are EXTREMELY over-optimized.
The page Titles, bold text atop the content area, H1 headline, product descriptions, size options, and "tabbed" description and features on these are identical. The ONLY difference is the country name.
If this is an issue across a significant portion of the site, you definitely have a problem.
While search engines do their best to understand similar products are going to have similar descriptions, on scale it's more glaring.
Note how Mat Bennett specifically stated "As long as the whole page doesn't become boilerplate with just the keyword changing you should be OK doing it with the titles." as his concern?
Yeah. There's a reason for that.
So - can you truly justify having one page for every country for your various products? Only if you can come up with ways to add at least SOME uniqueness to every page.
If not, you need to consider a redesign where all the "License Plate Sticker" pages are consolidated into ONE PAGE, with a dropdown menu for people to select their country.
(I don't want to come across as mean-spirited, however it is vital for you to understand the potential roadblocks to success your site has, and since I found that even in a very quick review, I only wonder how many other major crisis type issues the site suffers from)...
-
Thank you! But how about using two keywords for one product category - for example Aircraft Stickers, Aircraft Graphics? Is it a bad idea or can it be implemented?
-
1. This should be fine. As long as the whole page doesn't become boilerplate with just the keyword changing you should be OK doing it with the titles.
2. Again, as long as other parts of the page change this should be fine. It's quite a common thing and google is pretty good at understanding the difference.
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
-
Google News problem
Hello to all. The latest Google algorithm changes have had a big impact on the way that Google news features stories, at least in my country. I've been featured heavily in Google News until about 6th of october, when the changes had the biggest impact, but since then, I haven't been featured at all. Prior to this, I would be featured for keywords on almost any article, not necessarily on the 1st position, but I was almost always there. Posts still show up in the dedicated News category, but not in the main search pages. I've seen a lot of websites being impacted, but some with lower ranks than mine still show up there. I haven't done any changes prior to the 6th of october, and I haven't done any link building campaings, just getting links from higher ranking news sites in my country, for articles I wrote. What I'd like to know is if there were any major changes for Google News and I'm not complying with any of them, or If i could check to see if there are any other problems. I don't have any penalties disclosed by Google, and no new errors in the Webmasters console, I'm just baffled by the fact that overnight the website was completely cut off from being featured in Google News. And one other strange thing, I'm now ranking better for searches that are kind of opposite to my website's main theme. Think about mainly writing about BMW, and less about AUDI, but ranking a lot better for the latter, and a lot less for the other. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | thefrost0 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Duplicate page/Title content - Where?
Hi, I have just run a crawl on a new clients site, and there is several 'duplicate page content' and 'Duplicate Page Title'' issues. But I cannot find any duplicate content. And to make matters worse. The actual report has confused me. Just for example the about us page is showing in both reports and for both under 'Other URLs' it is showing 1? Why? Does this mean there is 1 other page with duplicate page title? or duplicate page content? Where are the pages that have the duplicate page titles, or duplicate page content? I have run scans using other software and a copyscape scan. And apart from missing page titles, I cannot find any page that has duplicate titles or content. I can find % percentages of pages with similar/same page titles/content. But this is only partial and contextually correct. So I understand that SEO Moz may pick percentage of content, which is fine, and therefore note that there is duplicate content/page titles. But I cannot seem to figure out where I would the source of the duplicate content/page titles. As there is only 1 listed in both reports for 'Other URLs' Hopefully my long question, has not confused. many thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | wood1e20 -
Duplicate Content - Products
When running a report it says we have lots of duplicate content. We are a e-commerce site that has about 45,000 sku's on the site. Products can be in multiple departments on the site. So the same products can show up on different pages of the site. Because of this the reports show multiple products with duplicate content. Is this an issue with google and site ranking? Is there a way to get around this issue?
Technical SEO | | shoedog1 -
Is it a problem to have an image + link in your menu
Hi, My menu has a image with links to some of the main pages on the site and text underneath it explaining what the banner is. Will it be beneficial or harmful to have the text hyperlinked to the same pages the images go to?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate content / title caused by CAPITALS
What is the best way to stop duplicate content warning (and Google classing them as duplicate content), when it is caused by CAPITALS (i.e www.domain.com/Directory & www.domain.com/directory ). I try to always use lower case (unless a place name then i use Capitals for the first letter), but it looks like i have slipped up and got some mixed up and other sites will also be linking to Capitals Thanks Jon
Technical SEO | | jonny5123790 -
Sneaky Page Title?
Hi Mozzers, I am a newbie, for sure. But I have been able to figure out how to help my customer very well; with the help of SEOMOZ of course. Here is the question: My customer (ZR) has a competitor and they use the phrase ZR.com in the title of one of their high ranked pages. Please see the enclosed graphic for the complete story. I would love to know if it is even legal (a pro would know) please see enclosed JPG... Thanks a bunch! OJ0ZL.jpg
Technical SEO | | Giggy0