Duplicate Content on Product Pages with Canonical Tags
-
Hi,
I'm an SEO Intern for a third party wine delivery company and I'm trying to fix the following issue with the site regarding duplicate content on our product pages:
Just to give you a picture of what I'm dealing with, the duplicate product pages that are being flagged have URLs that have different Geo-variations and Product-Key Variations. This is what Moz's Site Crawler is seeing as Duplicate content for the URL www.example.com/wines/dry-red/:
www.example.com/wines/dry-red/_/N-g123456
www.example.com/wines/dry-red/_/N-g456789
www.example.com/wines/California/_/N-0
We have loads of product pages with dozens of duplicate content and I'm coming to the conclusion that its the product keys that are confusing google. So we had the web development team put the canonical tag on the pages but still they were being flagged by google. I checked the of the pages and found that all the pages that had 2 canonical tags
I understand we should only have one canonical tag in the so I wanted to know if I could just easily remove the second canonical tag and will it solve the duplicate content issue we're currently having?
Any suggestions?
Thanks
-Drew
-
Hi Drew,
If you have multiple canonical tags on a single page, Google will ignore both of them so you will definitely need to to remove the old canonical tag so there is only one on each page.
But it sounds like you are trying to use canonical tags correctly to resolve these duplicate content issues.
If you wan't to read more about canonical tags, this recent article by Patrick Stox on Search Engine Land is excellent: http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tags-easy-right-whats-worst-happen-274635
Cheers,
David
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 website got indexed: Caused rank drop?
Hi all, We have replica of our website with exact pages and content. That website got indexed by mistake and allowed for bots for more than 10 days. Our ranking dropped now and we moved from 2nd page to 5th page. But previously we had this happened and didn't hurt much. We got punished now? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Website and landing pages - Proportionate authority
Does website's (homepage) ranking going to influence landing pages ranking or vice-versa? If the homepage is ranking good for a "keyword", will that improve ranking of other landing pages which are optimised for related "keywords" & Vice-versa?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Which is the best way - to have all FAQ pages at one place, or splitted in different sections of the website?
Hi all, We have a lot of FAQ sections on our website, splitted in different places, depending on products, technologies, etc. If we want to optimize our content for Google's Featured Snippets, Voice Search and etc. - what is the best option: to combine them all in one FAQ section? or it doesn't matter for Google that this type of content is not in one place? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | lgrozeva0 -
Ecommerce: How does having fresh content affect rankings
Hello, For an Ecommerce site, how does fresh content affect rankings? Meaning, fresh vs old content on the home page, category pages, product pages, articles. Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | BobGW0 -
Wordpress Canonical Tag Pointing to Same Page
So I noticed on a few of my clients wordpress tags (via moz) that there are canonical tags on URLs, pointing to that same URL. What is the point of that, and is it harming the website? Is this being done automatically via a plugin? Should I remove the canonical tags or leave as is?
Algorithm Updates | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Why do in-site search result pages rank better than my product pages?
Maybe this is a common SERP for a generic product type but I'm seeing it a lot more often. Here is an example SERP "rolling stools". The top 4 results are dynamic in-site search pages from Sears, ebay and Amazon (among others). I understand their influence and authority but why would a search return a dynamic in-site SERP instead of a solid product page. A better question would be - How do I get my in-site SERPs to rank or how do I get my client's page to rise above the #5 spot is currently ranks at? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | BenRWoodard0 -
Need some Real Insight into our SEO Issue and Content Generation
We have our site www.practo.com We have our blog as blog.practo.com We plan to have our main site in a months time from now as www.ray.practo.com The Issues - I will then need to direct all my existing traffic from www.practo.com to www.ray.practo.com Keeping in mind SEO and also since I will be generating new content via our Wordpress instance what are the best ways to do this so that google does not have difficulty in find out content 1. Would it be good if I put the Wordpress instance as ray.practo.com/ blog(wordpress instance comes in here in the directory) / article-url 2.Would it be better with www.practo.com / ray / blog/article-url I am using wordpress to roll out all our new SEO based content on various keywords and topics for which we want traffice - primary reasons are since we needed a content generation cms platform so that we dont have to deal with html pages and every time publish those content pages via a developer. Is the above - what soever I am planning to do in the correct manner keeping SEO in mind. Any suggestions are welcome. I seriously need to know writing seo based content on wordpress instance and have them in the urls is that a good idea? Or is only html a good idea. But we need some cms to be there so that content writers can write content independently. Please guide accordingly. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | shanky10 -
Site name appended to page title in google search
Hi there, I have a strange problem concerning how the search results for my site appears in Google. The site is Texaspoker.dk and for some strange reason that name is appended at the end of the page title when I search for it in Google. The site name is not added to the page titles on the site. If I search in Google.dk (the relevant search engine for the country I am targeting) for "Unibet Fast Poker" I get the following page title displayed in the search results: Unibet Fast Poker starter i dag - få €10 og prøv ... - Texaspoker.dk If you visit the actual page you can see that there is no site name added to the page title: http://www.texaspoker.dk/unibet-fast-poker It looks like it is only being appended to the pages that contains rich snippets markup and not he forum threads where the rich snippets for some reason doesn't work. If I do a search for "Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events" the title appears as it should without the site name being added: Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events Anybody have any experience regarding this or an idea to why this is happening? Maybe the rich snippets are automatically pulling the publisher name from my Google+ account... edited: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with rich snippets, if I search for "Billeder og stuff v.2" the site name is also appended and if I search for "bedste poker bonus" the site name is not.
Algorithm Updates | | MPO0