Duplicate Content / Canonical Conundrum on E-Commerce Website
-
Hi all,
I’m looking for some expert advice on use of canonicals to resolve duplicate content for an e-Commerce site. I’ve used a generic example to explain the problem (I do not really run a candy shop).
SCENARIO
I run a candy shop website that sells candy dispensers and the candy that goes in them. I sell about 5,000 different models of candy dispensers and 10,000 different types of candy.
Much of the candy fits in more than one candy dispenser, and some candy dispensers fit exactly the same types of candy as others.
To make things easy for customers who need to fill up their candy dispensers, I provide a “candy finder” tool on my website which takes them through three steps:
1. Pick your candy dispenser brand (e.g. Haribo)
2. Pick your candy dispenser type (e.g. soft candy or hard candy)
3. Pick your candy dispenser model (e.g. S4000-A)
RESULT: The customer is then presented with a list of candy products that they can buy. on a URL like this:
Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A
All of these steps are presented as HTML pages with followable/indexable links.
PROBLEM:
There is a duplicate content issue with the results pages. This is because a lot of the candy dispensers fit exactly the same candy (e.g. S4000-A, S4000-B and S4000-C). This means that the content on these pages are the basically same because the same candy products are listed. I’ll call these the “duplicate dispensers” E.g.
Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A
Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-B
Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-C
The page titles/headings change based on the dispenser model, but that’s not enough for the pages to be deemed unique by Moz. I want to drive organic traffic searches for the dispenser model candy keywords, but with duplicate content like this I’m guessing this is holding me back from any of these dispenser pages ranking.
SOLUTIONS
1. Write unique content for each of the duplicate dispenser pages: Manufacturers add or discontinue about 500 dispenser models each quarter and I don’t have the resources to keep on top of this content. I would also question the real value of this content to a user when it’s pretty obvious what the products on the page are.
2. Pick one duplicate dispenser to act as a rel=canonical and point all its duplicates at it. This doesn’t work as dispensers get discontinued so I run the risk of randomly losing my canonicals or them changing as models become unavailable.
3. Create a single page with all of the duplicate dispensers on, and canonical all of the individual duplicate pages to that page.
e.g. Canonical: candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series
Duplicates (which all point to canonical):
candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=A
candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=B
candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=C
PROPOSED SOLUTION
Option 3.
Anyone agree/disagree or have any other thoughts on how to solve this problem?
Thanks for reading.
-
Yes, adwords CR would give you that answer. The budget required depends on so many factors. But you can reduce the list of KW sampling the complete list.
But at least at macro level if you discuss that with someone from your client who knows his market and his consumers you should start getting an idea.
Logic+common sense is a good start.
I would analyze that before to start changing the website.
But if you do the opposite is not that you are going to break any porcelain. Duplicate content is not like a manual penalization, as far as I know, once you fix it and google crawl the new version the ranking is updated.
-
Thanks Max, your feedback makes complete sense.
KW volume analysis is a big job but managable, though I'm not even sure where I'd start with analysing whether people buy or not based on certain organic KWs. I'd probably have to set up Adwords campaigns and test conversion rates? Across a long tail of keywords that's going to be expensive to get statistically significant results.
Assuming that I don't have the resources to do that immediately, but that I do have a duplicate content issue (at least Moz seems to think so) am I better off "fixing" it with my proposed solution, or would you hold off until the KW analysis was done. This section of the site gets very little organic traffic at the moment as it's also a very competitive space and it doesn't have many inbound links so the risk of causing damage is low. I'm reluctant to start promoting this section and linking to it if I know there's a significant underlying duplicate content problem.
You're right about the URL too - it actually starts /Candy-Dispenser-Candies-Refills/*, I didn't think I'd get picked up on that!
Thanks,
George
-
As a rule of thumb I would put the category before the brand in the url structure. But...
In my opinion there's much more you should research before to take a decision.
Did you analyze your consumer behavior? What keywords are they going to type in google search box?
Are they really looking for your candy dispenser brands? Or by dispenser model names? Brand+model? Or they don't know much about candy dispensers manufacturer and models and just searching by some characteristics?
Don't be tricked by keywords volume, maybe there are a lot of searches for a brand or model, but what is their intention when searching by those terms? To buy? To find information planning to buy? To find information about a product they bought and learnt the name after making the purchase?
You should find out before to design the url structure.
And before to take a decision about how to mitigate the duplicate content risk.
What I mean is... There are characteristics of those dispensers you want to use to differentiate pages to target different keywords, and characteristics you can just put all in one page with “dispenser configurator”.
-
Same scenario on our site, we have a Product Finder search that returns x results based on user criteria. My solution canonical tag the search result pages to the root page.. in my case advanced_search.php.
My thought process is this, if somebody is searching for a very specific product, I absolutely don't want them hitting a random search page, rather I want them to see my product page. This means that the search page is likely crap in the rankings and that is by design.
There is nothing wrong with trying to capitalize on the search results, but isn't that what your categories and actual product pages are for?
Hope this helps,
Don
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
-
Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer0 -
Medical / Health Content Authority - Content Mix Question
Greetings, I have an interesting challenge for you. Well, I suppose "interesting" is an understatement, but here goes. Our company is a women's health site. However, over the years our content mix has grown to nearly 50/50 between unique health / medical content and general lifestyle/DIY/well being content (non-health). Basically, there is a "great divide" between health and non-health content. As you can imagine, this has put a serious damper on gaining ground with our medical / health organic traffic. It's my understanding that Google does not see us as an authority site with regard to medical / health content since we "have two faces" in the eyes of Google. My recommendation is to create a new domain and separate the content entirely so that one domain is focused exclusively on health / medical while the other focuses on general lifestyle/DIY/well being. Because health / medical pages undergo an additional level of scrutiny per Google - YMYL pages - it seems to me the only way to make serious ground in this hyper-competitive vertical is to be laser targeted with our health/medical content. I see no other way. Am I thinking clearly here, or have I totally gone insane? Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
Duplicate content on .com .au and .de/europe/en. Would it be wise to move to .com?
This is the scenario: A webstore has evolved into 7 sites in 3 shops: example.com/northamerica example.de/europe example.de/europe/en example.de/europe/fr example.de/europe/es example.de/europe /it example.com.au .com/northamerica .de/europe/en and .com.au all have mostly the same content on them (all 3 are in english). What would be the best way to avoid duplicate content? An answer would be very much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Bas0 -
Https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/ setting tag pages as blog corner stone article?
We do not have enough content rich page to target all of our keywords. Because of that My SEO guy wants to set some corner stone blog articles in order to rank them for certain key words on Google. He is asking me to use the following rule in our article writing(We have blog on our website):
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian
For example in our articles when we use keyword "wolf", link them to the blog page:
https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/
It seems like a good idea because in the tag page there are lots of material with the Keyword "wolf" . But the problem is when I search for keyword "wolf" for example on the Google, some other blog pages are ranked higher than this tag page. But he tells me in long run it is a better strategy. Any idea on this?0 -
News section of the website (Duplicate Content)
Hi Mozers One of our client wanted to add a NEWS section in to their website. Where they want to share the latest industry news from other news websites. I tried my maximum to understand them about the duplicate content issues. But they want it badly What I am planning is to add rel=canonical from each single news post to the main source websites ie, What you guys think? Does that affect us in any ways?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyas_heych0 -
Bi-Lingual Site: Lack of Translated Content & Duplicate Content
One of our clients has a blog with an English and Spanish version of every blog post. It's in WordPress and we're using the Q-Translate plugin. The problem is that my company is publishing blog posts in English only. The client is then responsible for having the piece translated, at which point we can add the translation to the blog. So the process is working like this: We add the post in English. We literally copy the exact same English content to the Spanish version, to serve as a placeholder until it's translated by the client. (*Question on this below) We give the Spanish page a placeholder title tag, so at least the title tags will not be duplicate in the mean time. We publish. Two pages go live with the exact same content and different title tags. A week or more later, we get the translated version of the post, and add that as the Spanish version, updating the content, links, and meta data. Our posts typically get indexed very quickly, so I'm worried that this is creating a duplicate content issue. What do you think? What we're noticing is that growth in search traffic is much flatter than it usually is after the first month of a new client blog. I'm looking for any suggestions and advice to make this process more successful for the client. *Would it be better to leave the Spanish page blank? Or add a sentence like: "This post is only available in English" with a link to the English version? Additionally, if you know of a relatively inexpensive but high-quality translation service that can turn these translations around quicker than my client can, I would love to hear about it. Thanks! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djreich0 -
Duplicate Content - Panda Question
Question: Will duplicate informational content at the bottom of indexed pages violate the panda update? **Total Page Ratio: ** 1/50 of total pages will have duplicate content at the bottom off the page. For example...on 20 pages in 50 different instances there would be common information on the bottom of a page. (On a total of 1000 pages). Basically I just wanted to add informational data to help clients get a broader perspective on making a decision regarding "specific and unique" information that will be at the top of the page. Content ratio per page? : What percentage of duplicate content is allowed per page before you are dinged or penalized. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Is this will post Duplicated Content
I have domain let say abcshoesonlinestore.com and inside pages of this abcshoesonlinestore.com is ranking very well such as affiliate page, knowledgebase page and other pages, HOWEVER i would like to change my home page and product page to shorter url which abcshoes.com and keep those inside page like www.abashoesonlinestore.com/affiliate or www.abcshoesonlinestore.com/knowledgebase as it is - will this pose duplicate content? This is my plan to do it: the home page and product page will be www.abcshoes.com and when people click www.abcshoes.com/affiliate it will redirect 301 to abcshoesonlinestore.com/affiliate HOWEVER if someone type abcshoesonlinestore.com or abcshoesonlinestore.com/product it will redirect to abcshoes.com or its product page itself (i want to use 302 instead 301 (ASSUMING if the homapage or product page have manual penalization or anything bad we want to leave it behind and start fresh JUST assume because i read some post that 301 will carry any bad thing to new site too) The reason i do not want to 301 from abcshoesonlinestore.com to abcshoes.com is because those many pages is ranking top 3 in GOOGLE ( i worry will lose this ranking since this bringing traffic for us) Is this good idea or bad idea or any better idea or should i try to see the outcome 🙂 - the only concern is from abcshoesonlinestore.com to abcshoes.com will pose as duplicate content if i do not use 301 - or can i use google webmaster tools to remove the home page and product page for abcshoesonlinestore.com can we tell google that? PS: (home page and product page will have new revise content and minor design change) but inside page will stay the same design Please give me some advise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | owen20110