Will duplicate content on ecommerce cause harm in search results?
-
First off, SEO learner, not a professional, therefore question is not for any client.
A new (less 1 yr) ecommerce site in a particular sector is now moving into partnership with relevant websites to be their online store. A 'store' link on the partner site will redirect to the ecommerce domain to a dedicated area (on a domain/directory path) with the partner's branding. To do this though means duplicating the entire catalogue for each partner that comes on board for this scheme.
So the original ecommercesite.com/categories also delivers
ecommercesite.com/partner1/categories (with partner's brand identity)
ecommercesite.com/partner2/categories (with partner's brand identity) and so on
Won't duplicating the product catalogue in directories cause problems in delivering effective SERPs for the original ecommerce site?
-
Thank you to both for replies. Gianluca that was exactly the answer I was looking for I guess which showed that I was on the right lines with my own thinking and learning but I also think I wasn't confident enough to assert that to someone developing an ecommerce site themselves from within their own limited resources.
But my initial spot of duplicate content on their site was right, their view is to fix it with robots.txt and no index tags so your excellent second link, Gianluca, and JoelHit's response has enabled me to give them to explain their situation and confidently recommend a solution appropriate to their needs.
Many thanks
-
Hi,
duplicate content per se is not cause of penalizations, but it penalizes the performance of your eCommerce in the rankings.
Infact:
- Search Engines would rank one of the duplicate pages and not the one you would like your site would rank for (domain.com/categories)
- People could link to a duplicate page and not the the main one, so wasting link juice
- All the duplicated pages consume you crawl budget, therefore you could have your site indexed for duplicates but not for more important pages.
I suggest you to read this "Learn SEO" article http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content and this post by Ben Jarriola that can give you solutions to this problem: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical
Hope this help you.
Ciao
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
I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem. My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS. The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles. It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles. So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?
Technical SEO | | Prop650 -
Duplicate content warning for a hierarchy structure?
I have a series of pages on my website organized in a hierarchy, let's simplify it to say parent pages and child pages. Each of the child pages has product listings, and an introduction at the top (along with an image) explaining their importance, why they're grouped together, providing related information, etc.
Technical SEO | | westsaddle
The parent page has a list of all of its child pages and a copy of their introductions next to the child page's title and image thumbnail. Moz is throwing up duplicate content warnings for all of these pages. Is this an actual SEO issue, or is the warning being overzealous?
Each child page has tons of its own content, and each parent page has the introductions from a bunch of child pages, so any single introduction is never the only content on the page. Thanks in advance!0 -
Duplicate content and rel canonicals?
Hi. I have a question relating to 2 sites that I manage with regards to duplicate content. These are 2 separate companies but the content is off a data base from the one(in other words the same). In terms of the rel canonical, how would we do this so that google does not penalise either site but can also have the content to crawl for both or is this just a dream?
Technical SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Do multipe empty search result pages count as duplicate content?
I am writing an online application that among other things allows the users to search through our database for results. Pretty simply stuff. My question is this. When the site is starting out, there will probably be a lot of searches that will bring back empty pages since we will still be building it up. Each page will dynamically generate the title tags, description tags, H1, H2, H3 tags - so that part will be unique - but otherwise they will be almost identical empty results pages until then. Would Google Count all these empty result pages as duplicate content? Anybody have any experience with this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Duplicate content issue with Wordpress tags?
Would Google really discount duplicate content created by Wordpress tags? I find it hard to believe considering tags are on and indexed by default and the vast majority of users would not know to deindex them . . .
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
SEOMOZ is giving me a number of duplicate content warnings related to pages that have an email a friend and/or email when back in stock versions of a page. I thought I had those blocked via my robots.txt file which contains the following... Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp Disallow: /Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp I had thought that the robot.txt file would solve this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | WaterSkis.com0 -
Duplicate content issue with trailing / ?
Hi ,I did a SEOmoz Crawl Test and found most pages show twice, for example: A: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk B: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk/ I've checked Google Analytics and 90% of organic search traffic arrives on the URLs with the trailing slash (B). Question 1: Can I assume I've a duplicate content problem? Question 2: Is it best to do 301 redirects from the 'non trailing slash' pages to the 'trailing slash pages'? Question 3: For some reason every web page has a '/index.php' in it (see A&B) above. No idea why. Should it be a SEO concern? Kind regards and thank you in advance Nigel
Technical SEO | | Richard5550 -
Google Duplicate Content Penalty On My Own Site?
I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June. On Bing I am like 9th On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows Original: www.playpokeronline.ca Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/ this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy. for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month. Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site. Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty? Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else? This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time Thank You Jeb
Technical SEO | | PokerCanada0