Magento Layered Navigation & Duplicate Content
-
Hello Dear SeoMoz,
I would like to ask your help with something that I am not sure off. Our ecommerce web site is built with Magento. I have found many problems so far and I know that there will be many more in the future. Currently, I am trying to find the best way to deal with the duplicate content that is produced from the layered navigation (size, gender etc). I have done a lot of research so far in order to understand which might be the best practice and I found the following practices:
- **Block layered navigation URLSs from the Google Webmaster Tools (**Apparently this works for Google Only).
- Block these URLs with the robots.txt file
- Make links no-follow
- **Make links JavaScript from Magento ***
- Avoid including these links in the xml site map.
- Avoid including these link in the A-Z Product Index.
- Canonical tag
- Meta Tags (noindex, nofollow)
Question
If I turn the layered navigation links into JavaScript links from the Magento Admin, the layered navigation links are still found by the crawlers but they look like that:
|
instead of:
http://www.mysite.com/girls-basics.html?gender_filte...
|
Can these new URLS (http://www.mysite.com/# ) solve the duplicate content problems with the layered navigation or do I need to implement other practices too to make sure that everything is done right.
Kind Regards
Stefanos Anastasiadis
-
I'm not sure if you guys found a solution to this but I've used Mageworx with my Magento sites and it seems to handle everything I need. I do have to do some Mod-rewrites but nothing too much for a developer to handle.
-
From what I can gather about Magento is the Layered Nav can create seemingly endless URL's. Even if you were to use one of the modules created to make them 'friendly', you would still technically have reems of duplicate pages...right? All nicely re-written but effectively with the same titles and meta...
You may be able to put a wildcard disallow in the robots file for the parameter 'dir=' , which is associated with all the filters. I dont know how well this will work or if Google may on occasision ignore this or find a way into the layered pages anyway? Does anyone know? What if the spider entered the site through a direct link to filtered page...would the robots.txt file go by the way side in this instance?
You could in theory also use WMT to dictate that Google does not index pages with the 'dir=' parameter. Again, I am not sure as to the success rate using this.
Its one of those areas that has many open and unaswered discussions but nothing definitive anywhere to address the issue. Yet Magento is very popular and as you look at people sites who use it you can see they have some how found a way to sort this out. Id love to be a fly on the wall in their office!
-
Stefanos:
Hi! Did you ever find an answer to this question? I have a Magento install as well and need some advanced technical SEO. Are you working with a Magento consultant at all?
Thanks!
Lynn
-
Thanks a lot for your reply. I already know this extension but it is not what I am looking for.
-
I don't know if you stumble upon this Extension,
but it may resolve your problems.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/EcommerceTeam/extension/4420/layered_navigation_seo
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
-
Duplicated Content on Wordpress Mobile&Desktop versions- Is it bad for SEO?
Hello, I use a Wordpress theme for displaying mobile and desktop versions separately. The problem is that if you use tools like screaming frog or if you look at the code (view source), you can detect duplicated content. But if you're browsing on your mobile you will see only the content I have created for the mobile version and the same if you're looking at the desktop version, you will only see the desktop content.
On-Page Optimization | | AlphaRoadside
Is this creating an SEO problem? If it is, please let me know why and if it has a solution. Thanks in advance.0 -
"Issue: Duplicate Page Content " in Crawl Diagnostics - but these pages are noindex
Saw an issue back in 2011 about this and I'm experiencing the same issue. http://moz.com/community/q/issue-duplicate-page-content-in-crawl-diagnostics-but-these-pages-are-noindex We have pages that are meta-tagged as no-everything for bots but are being reported as duplicate. Any suggestions on how to exclude them from the Moz bot?
On-Page Optimization | | Deb_VHB0 -
Does schema.org assist with duplicate content concerns
The issue of duplicate content has been well documented and there are lots of articles suggesting to noindex archive pages in WordPress powered sites. Schema.org allows us to mark-up our content, including marking a components URL. So my question simply, is no-indexing archive (category/tag) pages still relevant when considering duplicate content? These pages are in essence a list of articles, which can be marked as an article or blog posting, with the url of the main article and all the other cool stuff the scheme gives us. Surely Google et al are smart enough to recognise these article listings as gateways to the main content, therefore removing duplicate content concerns. Of course, whether or not doing this is a good idea will be subjective and based on individual circumstances - I'm just interested in whether or not the search engines can handle this appropriately.
On-Page Optimization | | MarkCA0 -
tagged as duplicate content?
Hello folks, I'm new to SEOmoz . I was looking at our Crawl Diagnostics and found that some of our blog posts that have been commented on were tagged as duplicate content. For example: http://thankyouregistry.com/blog/remarriages-and-gift-registries/ http://thankyouregistry.com/blog/remarriages-and-gift-registries/comment-page-1/ I'm unsure how to fix these, so any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | GiftReg0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
For duplicate page content, how different should pages be? For example, I have seven locations and on each location page, we offer a discount. The discounts are the same currently and open into a pop-up window. So it looks something like this: mysite.com/locationA/dicount mysite.com/locationB/discount mysite.com/locationX/discount The pages are identical. Should I change the verbiage on each page or let it be? I noticed that our organic search rankings have dropped since our site upgrade and this is one item that SEOMOZ has noted. Thanks! DHO
On-Page Optimization | | DougHoltOnline0 -
Summarize your question.Images being seen as duplicate content/pages
My images suddenly are appearing in my crawl reports as duplicate content, without meta tags, this happened over night and cant figure out why.
On-Page Optimization | | RBYoung0 -
How could I avoid the "Duplicate Page Content" issue on the search result pages of a webshop site?
My webshop site was just crawled by Roger, and it found 683 "Duplicate Page Content" issues. Most of them are result pages of different product searches, that are not really identical, but very similar to each other. Do I have to worry about this? If yes, how could I make the search result pages different? IS there any solution for this? Thanks: Zoltan
On-Page Optimization | | csajbokz0 -
What is the best solution for printable product pages (duplicate content)?
What do you think is the best solution for preventing duplicate content issues on printable versions of product pages? The printable versions are identical in content. Disallow in Robots.txt? Meta Robots No Index, Follow? Meta Robots No Index No Follow? Rel Canonical?
On-Page Optimization | | BlinkWeb1