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
-
Duplicate Footer Content Issue
Please check given screenshot URL. As per the screenshot we are using highlighted content through out the website in the footer section of our website (https://www.mastersindia.co/) . So, please tell us how Google will treat this content. Will Google count it as duplicate content or not? What is the solution in case if the Google treat it as duplicate content. Screenshot URL: https://prnt.sc/pmvumv
Technical SEO | | AnilTanwarMI0 -
Joomla: content accesible through all kinds of other links >> duplicate content?!
When i did a site: search on Google i've noticed all kind of URL's on my site were indexed, while i didn't add them to the Joomla navigation (or they were not linked anywhere on the site). Some examples: www.domain.com/1-articlename >> that way ALL articles are publicly visible, even if they are not linked to a menu-item... If by accident such a link get's shared it will be indexed in google, you can have 2 links with same content... www.domain.com/2-uncategorised >> same with categories, automatically these overview pages are visible to people who know this URL. On it you see all the articles that belong to that category. www.domain.com/component/content >> this gives an overview of all the categories inside your Joomla CMS I think most will agree this is not good for your site's SEO? But how can this be solved? Is this some kind of setting within Joomla? Anyone who dealt with these problems already?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Duplicate content or titles
Hello , I am working on a site, I am facing the duplicate title and content errors,
Technical SEO | | KLLC
there are following kind of errors : 1- A link with www and without www having same content. actually its a apartment management site, so it has different bedrooms apartments and booking pages , 2- my second issue is related to booking and details pages of bedrooms, because I am using 1 file for all booking and 1 file for all details page. these are the main errors which i am facing ,
can anyone give me suggestions regarding these issues ? Thnaks,0 -
Duplicate Content: Canonicalization vs. Redirects
Hi all, I have a client that I recently started working with whose site was built with the following structure: domain.com
Technical SEO | | marisolmarketing
domain.com/default.asp Essentially, there is a /default.asp version of every single page on the site. That said, I'm trying to figure out the easiest/most efficient way to fix all the /default.asp pages...whether that be 301 redirecting them to the .com version, adding a canonical tag to every .asp page, or simply NOINDEXing the .asp pages. I've seen a few other questions on here that are similar, but none that really say which would be the easiest way to accomplish this without going through every single page... Thanks in advance!0 -
Duplicate content vs. less content
Hi, I run a site that is currently doing very well in google for the terms that we want. We are 1,2 or 3 for our 4 targeted terms, but havent been able to jump to number one in two categories that I would really like to. In looking at our site, I didn't realize we have a TON of duplicate content as seen by SEO moz and I guess google. It appears to be coming from our forum, we use drupal. RIght now we have over 4500 pages of duplicate content. Here is my question: How much is this hurting us as we are ranking high. Is it better to kill the forum (which is more community service than business) and have a very tight site SEO-wise, or leave the forum even with the duplicate content. Thanks for your help. Erik
Technical SEO | | SurfingNosara0 -
Duplicate Page Content Report
In Crawl Diagnostics Summary, I have 2000 duplicate page content. When I click the link, my Wordpress return "page not found" and I see it's not indexed by Google, and I could not find the issue in Google Webmaster. So where does this link come from?
Technical SEO | | smallwebsite0 -
Whats with the backslash in the url adding as duplicate content?
Is this a bug or something that needs to be addressed? If so, just use a redirect?
Technical SEO | | Boogily0 -
About duplicate content
Hi i'm a new guy around here, but i'm having this problem in my website. Using de Seomoz tools i ran a camping to my website, in results i get to many errors for duplicate conten, for example, http://www.mysite/blue/ http://www.mysite/blue/index.html, so my question is, what is the best way to resolve this problem, use a 301 or use the rel canonical tag? Wich url will be consider for main url, Thanks for yor help.
Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM0