Canonical Tags for Legacy Duplicate Content
-
I've got a lot of duplicate pages, especially products, and some are new but most have been like this for a long time; up to several years. Does it makes sense to use a canonical tag pointing to one master page for each product. Each page is slightly different with a different feature and includes maybe a sentence or two that is unique but everything else is the same.
-
If you add the rel-tag to the master page then no. But, if you want them to rank for color and size and have a unique section of content let them stand along.
If you are not seeing major declines in traffic and you say they are indexed. I would keep it as it. You don't get hit for duplicate products but you will if the pages are gateway Keyword pages.
-
Thanks for the response! I checked and they are indexed. For a group of duplicate pages that have a rel canonical tag pointing to a master page, will those duplicate pages still rank if one searches the one thing that makes them unique? Such as a color, or certain product feature? I'm thinking that it makes sense to use the canonical tag but I would like those pages to continue to rank if someone searches for a particular product feature.
-
If you are not seeing a loss of traffic I would not bother. Check-in search console and see if the pages that are duplicate are indexed. Google might be already rel canonicalize them on their own. If that is the case the pages would not be indexed and in that case, I would add the rel tag to help Google better understand the flow of your website.
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/Similar Pages
Hello, I'm working on our site and I'm coming into an issue with the duplicate content. Our company manufactures heavy-duty mobile lifts. We have two main lifts. They are the same, except for capacity. We want to keep the format similar and the owner of the company wants each lift to have its own dedicated page. Obviously, since the layout is the same and content is similar I'm getting the duplicate content issue. We also have a section of our accessories and a section of our parts. Each of these sections have individual pages for the accessory/part. Again, the pages are laid out in a similar fashion to keep the cohesiveness, and the content is different, however similar. Meaning different terminology, part numbers, stock numbers, etc., but the overall wording is similar. What can I do to combat these issues? I think our ratings are dropping due to the duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | slecinc0 -
How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
Hi, I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind: -Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size -Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website. Looking forward to your opinions and solutions. Jeroen
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
Partially duplicated content on separate pages
TL;DR: I am writing copy for some web pages. I am duplicating some bits of copy exactly on separate web pages. And in other cases I am using the same bits of copy with slight alterations. Is this bad for SEO? Details: We sell about 10 different courses. Each has a separate page. I'm currently writing copy for those pages. Some of the details identical for each course. So I can duplicate the content and it will be 100% applicable. For example, when we talk about where we can run courses (we go to a company and run it on their premises) – that's applicable to every course. Other bits are applicable with minor alterations. So where we talk about how we'll tailor the course, I will say for example: "We will the tailor the course to the {technical documents|customer letters|reports} your company writes." Or where we have testimonials, the headline reads "Improving {customer writing|reports|technical documents} in every sector and industry". There is original content on each page. The duplicate stuff may seem spammy, but the alternative is me finding alternative re-wordings for exactly the same information. This is tedious and time-consuming and bizarre given that the user won't notice any difference. Do I need to go ahead and re-write these bits ten slightly different ways anyway?
Technical SEO | | JacobFunnell0 -
Self inflicted duplicate content penalty?
Wondering if I could pick the brains of fellow mozer's. Been working with a client for about 3 months now to get their site up in the engine. In the three months the DA has gone from about 11 to 34 and PA is 40 (up from about 15) so that's all good. However, we seem not to be moving up the ranking much. The average DA of competitors in the niche in the top ten is 25. We have 9.2 times the average no of backlinks too. During a call to the client today they told me that they noticed a major drop in their rankings a few months back. Didn't say this when we started the project. I just searched for the first paragraph on their homepage and it returns 16,000 hits in google, The second returns 9600 and the third 1,400. Searching for the first paragraph of their 'about us' page gives me 13,000 results!! Clearly something is not right here. Looking into this, I seems that someone has use their content, word for word, as the descriptions on thousands of blogs, social sites. I am thinking that this, tied in with the slow movement in the listings, has caused a duplicate content penalty in the search engines. The client haven't copied anyone's content as it is very specific for their site but it seems all over the web. I have advised them to change their site content asap and hope we get a Panda refresh in to view the new unique content. Once the penalty is off i expect the site to shoot up the rankings. From an seo company point of view, should I have seen this before? Maybe. If they had said they suffered a major drop in rankings a few months back - when they dropped their seo agency, I would have looked into it, but one doesn't naturally assume that a client's copy will be posted all over the web, it is not something I would have searched for without reason to search Any thoughts on this, either saying yes or no to my theory would be most welcome please. Thanks Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Duplicate Content Issues
We have some "?src=" tag in some URL's which are treated as duplicate content in the crawl diagnostics errors? For example, xyz.com?src=abc and xyz.com?src=def are considered to be duplicate content url's. My objective is to make my campaign free of these crawl errors. First of all i would like to know why these url's are considered to have duplicate content. And what's the best solution to get rid of this?
Technical SEO | | RodrigoVaca0 -
URL query considered duplicate content?
I have a Magento site. In order to reduce duplicate content for products of the same style but with different colours I have combined them on to 1 product page. I would like to allow the pictures to be dynamic, i.e. allow a user to search for a colour and all the products that offer that colour appear in the results, but I dont want the default product image shown but the product image for that colour applying to the query. Therefore to do this I have to append a query string to the end of the URL to produce this result: www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red My question is, will the query variations then be picked up as duplicate content: www.website.com/category/product-name.html www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=yellow Google suggest it has contingencies in its algorithm and I will not be penalised: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/google-duplicate-content-caused-by-url.html But other sources suggest this is not accurate. Note the article was written in 2007.
Technical SEO | | BlazeSunglass0 -
Caps in URL creating duplicate content
Im getting a bunch of duplicate content errors where the crawl is saying www.url.com/abc has duplicate at www.url.com/ABC The content is in magento and the url settings are lowercase, and I cant figure out why it thinks there is duplicate consent. These are pages with a decent number of inbound links.
Technical SEO | | JohnBerger0 -
Is this considered as duplicate content?
One of my clients has a template page they have used repeatedly each time they have a new news item. The template includes a two-paragraph customer quote/testimonial for the company. So, they now have 100+ pages with the same customer quote. The rest of the page content / body copy is unique. Is there any likelihood of this being considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110
