Crawling/indexing of near duplicate product pages
-
Hi,
Hope someone can help me out here. This is the current situation:
We sell stones/gravel/sand/pebbles etc. for gardens. I will take a type of pebbles and the corresponding pages/URL's to illustrate my question --> black beach pebbles.
- We have a 'top' product page for black beach pebbles on which you can find different types of quantities (differing from 20kg untill 1600 kg).
- There is not any search volume related to the different quantities
- The 'top' page does not link to the pages for the different quantities
- The content on the pages for the different quantities is not exactly the same (different price + slightly different content). But a lot of the content is the same.
Current situation:
- Most pages for the different quantities do not have internal links (about 95%)- But the sitemap does contain all of these pages.
- Because the sitemap contains all these URL's, google frequently crawls them (I checked the logfiles) and has indexed them.
Problems:
- Google spends its time crawling irrelevant pages --> our entire website is not that big, so these quantity URL's kind of double the total number of URL's.
- Having url's in the sitemap that do not have an internal link is a problem on its own
- All these pages are indexed so all sorts of gravel/pebbles have near duplicates.
My solution:
- remove these URL's from the sitemap --> that will probably stop Google from regularly crawling these pages
- Putting a canonical on the quantity pages pointing to the top-product page. --> that will hopefully remove the irrelevant (no search volume) near duplicates from the index
My questions:
- To be able to see the canonical, google will need to crawl these pages. Will google still do that after removing them from the sitemap?
- Do you agree that these pages are near duplicates and that it is best to remove them from the index?
- A few of these quantity pages do have intenral links (a few procent of them) because of a sale campaign. So there will be some (not much) internal links pointing to non-canonical pages. Would that be a problem?
Thanks a lot in advance for your help!
Best!
-
Hi Joseph, thanks for your reply, really helpful! 301 is not really an option, because these quantity URL's are sometimes used for promotions and need to be reachable. Therefore I guess canonicals are the second best solution.
We will implement the solution I described and see what will happen. Thanks again!
-
Hello there,
To answer your questions,
1. Google will still crawl your pages even if it's not from the sitemap unless you specify disallow from your robots.txt
2. If they are similar content with the main difference at "quantities" couldn't you consolidate them into one single page that lists all the quantities your company sell in and then 301 redirect the other pages to the consolidated one?
3. It doesn't seem like going to be causing any problem nor hurting your SEO performance, but you could always change these link to the canonical link.
Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap
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
-
Page / Domain Authority Question
If my website were to purchase a sponsored article on a site with a powerful domain authority that contained a do-follow link, and the link would be "domain.com/articles/new-article" ... obviously new-article would have 0 page authority, being new... is that still considered a valuable link and why or why not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cat5com0 -
Duplicate page title at bottom of page - ok, or bad?
Can I get you experts opinion? A few years ago, we customized our pages to repeat the page title at the bottom of the page. So the page title is in the breadcrumbs at the top, and then it's also at the bottom of the page under all the contents. Here is a sample page: bit.ly/1pYyrUl I attached a screen shot and highlighted the second occurence of the page title. Am worried that this might be keyword stuffing, or over optimizing? Thoughts or advice on this? Thank you so much! ron ZH8xQX6
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Old pages still in index
Hi Guys, I've been working on a E-commerce site for a while now. Let me sum it up : February new site is launched Due to lack of resources we started 301's of old url's in March Added rel=canonical end of May because of huge index numbers (developers forgot!!) Added noindex and robots.txt on at least 1000 urls. Index numbers went down from 105.000 tot 55.000 for now, see screenshot (actual number in sitemap is 13.000) Now when i do site:domain.com there are still old url's in the index while there is a 301 on the url since March! I know this can take a while but I wonder how I can speed this up or am doing something wrong. Hope anyone can help because I simply don't know how the old url's can still be in the index. 4cArHPH.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssiebn70 -
Ecommerce SEO - Indexed product pages are returning 404's due to product database removal. HELP!
Hi all, I recently took over an e-commerce start-up project from one of my co-workers (who left the job last week). This previous project manager had uploaded ~2000 products without setting up a robot.txt file, and as a result, all of the product pages were indexed by Google (verified via Google Webmaster Tool). The problem came about when he deleted the entire product database from our hosting service, godaddy and performed a fresh install of Prestashop on our hosting plan. All of the created product pages are now gone, and I'm left with ~2000 broken URL's returning 404's. Currently, the site does not have any products uploaded. From my knowledge, I have to either: canonicalize the broken URL's to the new corresponding product pages, or request Google to remove the broken URL's (I believe this is only a temporary solution, for Google honors URL removal request for 90 days) What is the best way to approach this situation? If I setup a canonicalization, would I have to recreate the deleted pages (to match the URL address) and have those pages redirect to the new product pages (canonicalization)? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | byoung860 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Why is my Crawl Report Showing Thousands of Pages that Do Not Exist?
Hi, I just downloaded a Crawl Summary Report for a client's website. I am seeing THOUSANDS of duplicate page content errors. The overwhelming majority of them look something like this: ERROR: http://www.earlyinterventionsupport.com/resources/parentingtips/development/parentingtips/development/development/development/development/development/development/parentingtips/specialneeds/default.aspx This page doesn't exist and results in a 404 page. Why are these pages showing up? How do I get rid of them? Are they endangering the health of my site as a whole? Thank you, Jenna <colgroup><col width="1051"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JennaCMag
| |0 -
Can I Use Cross Domain Canonical For Duplicate Categories & Product Pages?
I want to fix issue regarding duplicate categories & product pages on my multiple eCommerce websites. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas-fiberbuilt-umbrellas-llc-7gcrw-teal.html - Want to rank with this... http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/patio-umbrellas-fiberbuilt-umbrellas-llc-7gcrw-teal.html - Duplicate one! http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas - Want to rank with this... http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/patio-umbrellas - Duplicate one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Static index page or not?
Are there any advantages of dis-advantages to running a static homepage as opposed to a blog style homepage. I have be running a static page on my site with the latest posts displayed as links after the homepage content. I would like to remove the static page and move to a more visually appealing homepage that includes graphics for each post and the posts droppping down the page like normal blogs do. How will this effect my site if I move from a static page to a more dynamic blog style page layout? Could I still hold the spot I currently rank for with the optimized index content if I turn to a more traditional blog format? cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoCoGuru0