E-Commerce Duplicate Content
-
Hello all
We have an e-commerce website with approximately 3,000 products. Many of the products are displayed in multiple categories which in turn generates a different URL!
Accross the entire site I have noticed that the product pages are always outranked by competitors who have lower page authority, domain authority, total links etc etc.
I am convinced this is down to duplicate content issues. I understand there is no direct penalty but how would this affect our rankings? Is page rank split between all the duplicates, which in turn lowers it's ranking potential?
I have looked for a way to identify duplicate content using Google analytics but i've been unsuccessful. If the duplicate content is the issue and page rank is divided am i best using canonical or 301 redirects?
Sorry if this is an obvious question but If i'm correct we could see a huge improvement in rankings accross the board. Wow!
Cheers
Todd
-
When Google finds more than one document (ie URL) with the same content, it has to define which of them is the representative document of the cluster. In doing this it looks at inbound link metrics, essentially, plus date of the page, pagerank and other factors. In this decision, it can be wrong, indexing a page that can hurt you indexation (consider this situation: it indexes as representative document page 2 of a listing page in descending order: new items in this category end to be at page 2 or later and are less likely to be discovered).
The canonical tag can be a good solution, even if it is a hint and not a rule to Google...
-
Great stuff thanks!...
-
SEOMOZ had an awesome whiteboard on this.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation
Some more additional resources:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dealing-with-faceted-navigation-a-case-study
Matt Cutts on faceted navigation:
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml
Hope they help you
-
Thanks again! Unfortunately our system was built in house from scratch with no consideration for duplicate content
To be honest the product pages that I'm worried about have very few or no inbound links so maybe this isn't such a huge issue.
I have picked up on the fact almost all our pages including the homepage work on www and non www so maybe creating a 301 redirect for these will help also.
I will test the conical tag on a range of pages and mointor the results, hopefully our rankings will increase and I can look at some kind of strategy to roll this out.
Cheers for the help!
-
Google will select the most authortive aka whichever has the most links.
If you have a ton of inbound links I would recommend doing lots of research before inserting that tag. Find out which pages have the authority and don't throw it away.
This was a plague of eCommerce for years. Luckly most of the newest moden platfroms have caught up.
-
The duplicate item pages will not be indexed but visited the google bot. He will consider this page to be the one linked in the canonical tag.
I hope you won't have to set the urls manually !
-
Thanks for the quick response chaps! So if we have 9 duplicates for example will Google index all 9 pages or decide on 1 and never revisit the rest.
I couldn't see any duplicate URLs in the top content report.
We have over 3,000 products so it will be fun adding canonical tags to all the necessary pages
-
Toddy,
For every product of your site, you should identify its main category (the one that will be indexed). When seeing a product with a different category url, use the rel=canonical tag to give google the good url. This works well with e-commerce site.
You may also apply this logic between categories, as some listing between two categories are sometimes very similar.
For more information about the rel=canonical tag, see these resources :
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
-
The only "penalty" is the fact you could potentially spread your link juice across those multiple pages. Example:
You have 104 links to the same product, but they are equally pointed a 4 unique URLs. Now you technically have 26 links on whatever page Google 'selects' as your authority page.
Your competition has 100 links to the same product which only has 1 page.
With that type of setup your competition is always going to have that authority page ranked abouve you.
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
-
How to index e-commerce marketplace product pages
Hello! We are an online marketplace that submitted our sitemap through Google Search Console 2 weeks ago. Although the sitemap has been submitted successfully, out of ~10000 links (we have ~10000 product pages), we only have 25 that have been indexed. I've attached images of the reasons given for not indexing the platform. gsc-dashboard-1 gsc-dashboard-2 How would we go about fixing this?
Technical SEO | | fbcosta0 -
Recurring events and duplicate content
Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | | megan.helmer0 -
Subdomain Severe Duplicate Content Issue
Hi A subdomain for our admin site has been indexed and it has caused over 2000 instances of duplicate content. To fix this issue, is a 301 redirect or canoncial tag the best option? http://www.example.com/services http://admin.example.com/services Really appreciate your advice J
Technical SEO | | Metricly-Marketing0 -
Canonicalization Issue | E-commerce
Hey everyone! How are you doing? I spent this week trying to solve some technical issues on my website. However i am having trouble with Duplicate Content. I came to the conclusion that canonicalization is a great solution to this problem, however, i am having trouble implementing it. The duplicate problem arises from the fact that for each product i have several colors or different attributes. For example. I have the category "Construction Clips" and then links to "Color" in which the user can choose White or Sandstone. The content is almost identical for both of them, the only thing that changes is the color. This scenarios repeats many times throughout my webcommerce site. And is throwing me off many Duplicate Content errors. I cannot use the canonicalization in the White or Sandstone page, because is a product page, it doesnt let me add or change anything on the header. http://aceromart.com/Clip-Glamet-Blanco.aspx I dont intend to rank well on most product pages, my priority is that i dont want duplicate errors on my website. What is the best solution for this conundrum? Regards!!! In advance, i thank you for your opinions!
Technical SEO | | JesusD0 -
An odd duplicate content issue...
Hi all, my developers have just assured me that nothing has changed form last week but in the today's crawl I see all the website duplicated: and the difference on the url is the '/' so basically the duplicated urls are: htts://blabla.bla/crop htts://blabla.bla/crop/ Any help in understanding why is much appreciated. thanks
Technical SEO | | LeadGenerator0 -
Lots of duplicate content warnings
I have a site that says that I have 2,500 warnings. It is a real estate website and of course we use feeds. it says I have a lot of duplicate content. One thing is a page called "Request an appointment" and that is a url for each listing. Since there are 800 listings on my site. How could I solve this problem so that this doesn't show up as duplicate content since I use the same "Request an Appointment" verbeage on each of those? I guess my developer who used php to do it, created a dedicated url to each. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SeaC0 -
What is the best practice to handle duplicate content?
I have several large sections that SEOMOZ is indicating has duplicate content, even though the content is not identical. For example: Leather Passport Section - Leather Passports - Black - Leather Passposts - Blue - Leather Passports - Tan - Etc. Each of the items has good content, but it is identical, since they are the same products. What is the best practice here: 1. Have only one product with a drop down (fear is that this is not best for the customer) 2. Make up content to have them sound different? 3. Put a do-no-follow on the passport section? 4. Use a rel canonical even though the sections are technically not identical? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Duplicate page content issue needs resolution.
After my last "crawl" report, I received a warning about "duplicate page content". One page was: http://anycompany.com and the other was: http://anycompany.com/home.html How do I correct this so these pages aren't competing with each other or is this a problem?
Technical SEO | | JamesSagerser0