How bad is duplicate content for ecommerce sites?
-
We have multiple eCommerce sites which not only share products across domains but also across categories within a single domain.
Examples:
We have selected canonical links for each domain but I need to know if this practice is having a negative impact on my SEO.
-
If you're canonicalizing duplicate pages to a single source, assuming it's the one you want to promote, then no, it shouldn't hurt your SEO. The site you're pointing at should see some benefit, and the ones doing the pointing will take a backseat, possibly drop a bit. I'm guessing that's the whole idea?
But why do you have multiple sites that have the same products and descriptions if you're not trying to drive organic traffic to all of them? Is it more for paid landing page purposes? If not, why not 301 them to the main site instead? Or, as EGOL suggested, build out content that makes each site uniquely helpful and authoritative so that those canonicals aren't necessary?
-
Artisancrafted, as long as you are using the canonical tag properly on the sites, it shouldn't be hurting your site's SEO at all. However, if you are able to move towards having unique product descriptions on each site then that will benefit your SEO in the long run.
-
Hello,
This is kind of an indirect answer, but basically Google accepts that there are going to be duplicates when it comes to products on the market with multiple providers. The way they have structured this is that duplicate content in this capacity is not going to hurt you, but creating original content for products and categories will help you.
A big point is to work towards the knowledge graph and "being the answer". You want to get away from simply describing the product and get into describing who would benefit most from it, what kinds of detailing are best suited to it, which color tones work well with it and so on. In this case, if you wanted a new sink in your house, what questions would you be asking?
If you can answer those questions, there are good odds that the combination of original content and directing content to user queries will give you a boost rather than forcing you to worry about taking a penalty.
Fire any follow-up questions you have my way if you like - always happy to help!
Cheers,
Rob
-
I know that this is not the type of response that you were looking for.... but I think that you have a tremendous opportunity. You already have multiple sites up and running. Now for the small cost of improving their content you will improve the performance of your entire business and the diversified product descriptions (and diverse title tags) will bring in more traffic from the long tail searches.
By mathematics the increased number of sales will be an awesome contribution to your profits, because you will gain economy of scale. You might even be able to hire a person to write new and better descriptions and the lift in your sales will fund their salary.
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
-
Do you think this case would be of a duplicated content and what would be the consequences in such case?
At the webpage https://authland.com/ which is a food&wine tours and activities booking platform, primary content - services thumbnails containing information about the destination, title and prices of the particular services, can be found at several sub-pages/urls. For example, service https://authland.com/zadar/zadar-region-food-and-wine-tour/1/. Its thumbnail/card through which the service is available, can be found on multiple pages (Categories, Destinations, All services, Most recent services...) Is this considered a duplicated content? Since all of the thumbnails for services on the platform, are to be found on multiple pages. If it is, which would be the best way to avoid that content being perceived by Google bots as such? Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZD20200 -
How to rank an ecommerce site for search terms starting with how where why
Hi guys, I just got a new SEO job for an e commerce store, the client is asking to rank the site for keywords like where to buy used phone, where to sell my used phone for for best rates and so, the question is how can i achieve that, can anyone help me with some concrete suggestion? Thanks in Advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mkhurramali0 -
Same-server, Same-Market, Micro-Sites backlinks.. good or bad?
Hi there, We are a real estate listings portal and we also create micro sites for real estate agents. These micro-sites are hosted on our same server, similar in structure, different in design... different in content. They all link to us but not within each other. They all link to us because they have to access our login system in order to manage their property listings on their own micro sites (which updates on our own website too). (Also as marketing for others to see that we have built their sites with our engine). Would all these backlinks be considered to be coming from the same c-block? Thus, being sub-optimal for our SEO efforts? Should we worry about grouping them and giving them separate IP addresses? Should we add nofollow tags to these links or are there any other things you would worry about? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | propertypalseo0 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
How to Best Establish Ownership when Content is Duplicated?
A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author? Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A. Will that work, or is there a better solution? This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Allie_Williams0 -
Is this duplicate content something to be concerned about?
On the 20th February a site I work on took a nose-dive for the main terms I target. Unfortunately I can't provide the url for this site. All links have been developed organically so I have ruled this out as something which could've had an impact. During the past 4 months I've cleaned up all WMT errors and applied appropriate redirects wherever applicable. During this process I noticed that mydomainname.net contained identical content to the main mydomainname.com site. Upon discovering this problem I 301 redirected all .net content to the main .com site. Nothing has changed in terms of rankings since doing this about 3 months ago. I also found paragraphs of duplicate content on other sites (competitors in different countries). Although entire pages haven't been copied there is still enough content to highlight similarities. As this content was written from scratch and Google would've seen this within it's crawl and index process I wanted to get peoples thoughts as to whether this is something I should be concerned about? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bfrl0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
Questions about turning my wordpress site into an ecommerce site. Experience needed.
I have a wordpress site that is about a product that is now getting some great traffic. Right now It has affiliate stuff on it. I want to sell my own product so I will be turning this wordpress site into an ecommerce site. I want to redesign it so I am not looking for simple plugins to just add a cart. The part I am really confused about is what to do with my posts and categories? How does that work when turning this site into an ecommerce site? Lets say the site is "hats for adults" My post pages are things like "funny hats for adults", "hats for adult men" etc etc. Would I turn these posts pages into like category pages that have a category of products. Or should I create real categories and have my developer turn those into the ecommerce category pages and then redirect my posts to those categories? Maybe I don't even know what I am talking about. Is this even making sense? This is a small site (5posts and 1 category) and most of the traffic will come from the homepage keywords anyways.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0