Duplicate content on product pages
-
Hi,
We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication.
Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?
-
To be honest, this type of thing is definitely a weak point in my knowledge but if it were my site, I wouldn't be heading in this direction with it.
What you're essentially doing is obscuring duplicate content from search engines but presenting it to users which we know is a no-no. It may well be that search engines can't "see" that duplicate content just yet but that doesn't mean they won't in the next update.
More importantly, users aren't particularly engaged by seeing the same block of content over and over so it's kind of a waste of valuable screen real estate.
One other question to consider with this scenario: do users actually want to know about this manufacture process? This isn't a leading question. What I'm getting at is that content should always cover what the user wants to know, not what the business wants them to read about.
If this process is really just a sidenote for most users, risking content duplication to push it directly in front of them is a large and unnecessary risk.
Of course, if the process is a unique selling point that may actually persuade sales and/or build that rapport, disregard this point
-
What are your thoughts around using OnScroll() function because it seems the search engines don't crawl this function easily and therefore uploading the content in that way might be safer.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html
-
It's a frustrating problem to have, huh?
Rand did do a Whiteboard Friday on this general topic a while back which is fairly relevant here. As Dmitrii mentioned, option 1 is definitely the best option since the others mean content duplication of some form.
My best suggestion on this one would be to add a very short and enticing intro (I'm talking 1 or 2 lines) about that manufacture process and if they're interested, they can follow the link to the page all about it. Just make sure this link uses target="_blank" so it opens in a new tab for them. At least this way when they close that tab, they're right back to the product page they were on.
It is a risk but far safer than duplicating that same content across a bunch of products!
So, using Rand's advice from that WBF, you can pad out the content of your products very well and very uniquely and that line or 2 of text used as a "hook" to draw them to the other page is insignificant. Duplicate content is all about a ratio so if you have 2 lines of duplication amongst 500 words of unique and valuable text, it's not likely to be an issue.
Probably not the solution you were looking for but I hope it helps!
-
Hi there.
Well, don't put duplicates on every product page, that's for sure. The #1 option you have is very good idea. You say that you are afraid of users leaving product page and not coming back. Here is my idea:
Do option #1, but also dynamically "transfer" the product to that page. So, for instance you are on a product page domain.com/product1.php, when you click on a link about information (which is lets say domain.com/information.php), add a parameter to that link based on product page url you were coming from like so - domain.com/information.php?product1.
And then add extra section on information page with product details, possibility to add to cart etc, based on parameter. This way you can exclude urls with parameters from indexing (read here) or canonicalize all parameter pages to info page. This way you won't have any duplicate issues.
Cheers
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
-
Topical keywords for product pages and blogs
Hi all, I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank. However, duplicate content is of course still an issue. So here's my question: A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website: Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally. You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions. But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page. So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well. Any ideas on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Pagination causing duplicate content problems
Hi The pagination on our website www.offonhols.com is causing duplicate content problems. Is the best solution adding add rel=”prev” / “next# to the hrefs As now the pagination links at the bottom of the page are just http://offonhols.com/default.aspx?dp=1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | offonhols
http://offonhols.com/default.aspx?dp=2
http://offonhols.com/default.aspx?dp=3
etc0 -
Duplicate page content errors stemming from CMS
Hello! We've recently relaunched (and completely restructured) our website. All looks well except for some duplicate content issues. Our internal CMS (custom) adds a /content/ to each page. Our development team has also set-up URLs to work without /content/. Is there a way I can tell Google that these are the same pages. I looked into the parameters tool, but that seemed more in-line with ecommerce and the like. Am I missing anything else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Duplicate pages with http and https
Hi all, We changed the payment part of our site to https from http a while ago. However once on the https pages, all the footer and header links are relative URLs, so once users have reached the payment pages and then re-navigate back to other pages in our website they stay on https. The build up of this happening has led to Google indexing all our pages in https (something we did not want to happen), and now we are in the situation where our homepage listing on Google is https rather than http. We would prefer the organic listings to be http (rather than https) and having read lots on this (included the great posts on the moz (still feels odd not refering to it as seomoz!) blog around this subject), possible solutions include redirects or a canoncial tags. My additional questions around these options are: 1. We already have 2 redirects on some pages (long story), will another one negatively impact our rankings? 2. Is a canonical a strong enough hint to Google to stop Google indexing the https versions of these page to the extent that out http pages will appear in natural listings again? If anyone has any other suggestions or other ideas of how to address this issue, that would be great! Thanks 🙂 Diana
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Diana.varbanescu0 -
Why are these pages considered duplicate content?
I have a duplicate content warning in our PRO account (well several really) but I can't figure out WHY these pages are considered duplicate content. They have different H1 headers, different sidebar links, and while a couple are relatively scant as far as content (so I might believe those could be seen as duplicate), the others seem to have a substantial amount of content that is different. It is a little perplexing. Can anyone help me figure this out? Here are some of the pages that are showing as duplicate: http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/narrator/Seth+Green/?bioid=5554 http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byAuthor/author/Solomon+Northup/?bioid=11758 http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/?mediatype=audio+books&bioid=3665 http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byAuthor/author/Marcus+Rediker/?bioid=10145 http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/narrator/Robin+Miles/?bioid=2075
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DownPour0 -
Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?0 -
SEOMOZ duplicate page result: True or false?
SEOMOZ say's: I have six (6) duplicate pages. Duplicate content tool checker say's (0) On the physical computer that hosts the website the page exists as one file. The casing of the file is irrelevant to the host machine, it wouldn't allow 2 files of the same name in the same directory. To reenforce this point, you can access said file by camel-casing the URI in any fashion (eg; http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm). This does not bring up a different file each time, the server merely processes the URI as case-less and pulls the file by it's name. What is happening in the example given is that some sort of indexer is being used to create a "dummy" reference of all the site files. Since the indexer doesn't have file access to the server, it does this by link crawling instead of reading files. It is the crawler that is making an assumption that the different casings of the pages are in fact different files. Perhaps there is a setting in the indexer to ignore casing. So the indexer is thinking that these are 2 different pages when they really aren't. This makes all of the other points moot, though they would certainly be relevant in the case of an actual duplicated page." ****Page Authority Linking Root Domains http://www.agi-automation.com/ 43 82 http://www.agi-automation.com/index.html 25 2 http://www.agi-automation.com/Linear-escapements.htm 21 1 www.agi-automation.com/linear-escapements.htm 16 1 http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm 30 3 http://www.agi-automation.com/pneumatic-grippers.htm 16 1**** Duplicate content tool estimates the following: www and non-www header response; Google cache check; Similarity check; Default page check; 404 header response; PageRank dispersion check (i.e. if www and non-www versions have different PR).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AGIAutomation0 -
Cross-Domain Canonical and duplicate content
Hi Mozfans! I'm working on seo for one of my new clients and it's a job site (i call the site: Site A).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
The thing is that the client has about 3 sites with the same Jobs on it. I'm pointing a duplicate content problem, only the thing is the jobs on the other sites must stay there. So the client doesn't want to remove them. There is a other (non ranking) reason why. Can i solve the duplicate content problem with a cross-domain canonical?
The client wants to rank well with the site i'm working on (Site A). Thanks! Rand did a whiteboard friday about Cross-Domain Canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday0