Shopify Duplicate Content in products
-
Hello Moz Community,
New to Moz and looking forward to beginning my journey towards SEO education and improving our clients' sites.
Our client's website is a Shopify store. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/
Our first Moz reports show 686 duplicate content issues. I will show the first 4 as examples.
As you can see, URL titles are unique. But I know that the content in each of those products have very similar product descriptions but not exactly. But since they have been flagged as a site issue by Moz, I am guessing that the content is 95% duplicate.
So can a rel=canonical be the right solution for this type of duplicate content?
Or should I be considering adding new content to each of 686 products to drop below the 95% threshold?
Or another solution that I may not be aware of.
Thanks in advance for your assistance and expertise!
Sean
-
You're welcome. Best of luck!
-
Thanks Erica,
Confirming that the actual page content is the issue helps me a lot. Thanks for the suggestions and now it's time to start the fixing those with the client.
Sean
-
The problem is definitely the actual page content is almost identical, even if the products are different. This is a very common problem for e-commerce sites. Typically, there are two solutions:
1. You write more unique content about each product. This can be daunting, but it does matter. You can also drive user reviews which are going to create user generated unique content for your products. I'd suggest doing a mix of them. (And yep, I've been there writing unique content for thousands of products, so I feel you.)
2. Instead of selling these very similar products on individual pages, you can make the different designs like e-commerce sites often show different colors. It becomes an option to choose the orca ones or the eagle ones, instead of a unique lander for each.
-
I just encountered the same issue with a client on Shopify.
I did notice that shopify creates two versions of the site. One version is the HTTPS and the other is HTTP. This creates a duplicate for each page. You may want to try filtering out one version and making change suggestions. When you update it will take effect on the other.
I am still trying to figure out some of the "collection pages" and how to move forward on these.
Good Question!
Matthew
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
-
Duplicate Content Question
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Technical SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
Hiding Duplicate Content using Javascript
We have e-commerce site selling books. Besides basic information on books, we have content for “About the book” , “Editorial Reviews”, “About the author” etc. But the content in all these section are duplicate and are available on all sites selling similar books. Our question is: 1.Should we worry about the content being duplicate?2.If yes, then will it by a good idea to hide this duplicate content using javascript or iframe?
Technical SEO | | CyrilWilson0 -
Duplicate Content on Navigation Structures
Hello SEOMoz Team, My organization is making a push to have a seamless navigation across all of its domains. Each of the domains publishes distinctly different content about various subjects. We want each of the domains to have its own separate identity as viewed by Google. It has been suggested internally that we keep the exact same navigation structure (40-50 links in the header) across the header of each of our 15 domains to ensure "unity" among all of the sites. Will this create a problem with duplicate content in the form of the menu structure, and will this cause Google to not consider the domains as being separate from each other? Thanks, Richard Robbins
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0 -
Query string in url - duplicate content?
Hi everyone I would appreciate some advice on the following. I have a page which has some nice content on but it also has a search functionality. When a search is run a querystrong is run. So i will get something like mypage.php?id=20 etc. With many different url potentials, will each query string be seen as a different page? If so i don't want duplicate content. So am i best putting canonical tags in the head tags on mypage.php ? to avoid Google seeing potential duplicate content. Many thanks for all your advice.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Different TLD's same content - duplicate content? - And a problem in foreign googles?
Hi, Operating from the Netherlands with customers troughout Europe we have for some countries the same content. In the netherlands and Belgium Dutch is spoken and in Germany and Switserland German is spoken. For these countries the same content is provided. Does Google see this as duplicate content? Could it be possible that a german customer gets the Swiss website as a search result when googling in the German Google? Thank you for your assistance! kind regards, Dennis Overbeek Dennis@acsi.eu
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Duplicate content check picking up weird urls
Hi everyone, I love the duplicate content feature; we have a lot of duplicate content issues due to the way our site is structured. So, we're working on them. However, I'm not fully understanding the results. For example, say I have an article on breast cancer symptoms. It shows up as duplicate content, by having two urls that point to the exact same page. http://www.healthchoices.ca/articles/breast cancer symptoms and http://www.healthchoices.ca/somerandomstringofcode. I fully understand why that is duplicate content. I am not sure about this though, it picks up the same url twice and calls it duplicate content. For example, saying that http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so and http://www.healthchoices.ca/dr.-so-and-so is duplicate...however is this not the same page? Is there something I'm missing? Many of the URL's are identical. Thanks, Erin
Technical SEO | | erinhealthchoices0