This Rookie needs help! Duplicate content pages dropped significantly.
-
So I am pretty new to SEO Moz. I have an e-commerce site and recently did a website redesign. However, not without several mistakes and issues. That said, when SEO Moz did a crawl of my site, the results showed A LOT of Duplicate Content Pages on my site due to my having one item in many variations. It was almost over whelming and because the number of pages was so high, I have been trying to research ways to correct it quickly. The latest crawl from yesterday shows a drastic drop in the number of duplicate content pages and a slight increase in pages with too long page titles (which is fixable). I am embarrassed to give the number of duplicate pages that were showing but, just know, it's been reduced to a third of the amount.
I am just wondering if I missed something and should I be happy or concerned? Has there been a change that could have caused this? Thanks for helping this rookie out!
-
OH BOY! You're going to have to let me read through this a time or two and get back to you! I think I get it but I need to digest a bit of this canonical stuff that I keep avoiding.
Thank you so much. I'll get back.
-
I would strongly consider using the rel=canonical tags on your pages. If you have 1 main product 20 variations in color and 3 different image prints as well then here is what I would do.
Find the most popular of the 20 variations in color and utilize the rel=canonical for the 19 other pages to point back to that most popular page. Dont worry about changing copy or anything drastically for this.
Now lets assume that the three different images are a disney print chair, a LOTR print chair and a Pixar Print Chair. You believe that people might actually be searching for these 3 products in a different way than your other 20. You should then try to create unique content for all 3 of these pages that differ from not only the other 20 color variations but also each of the other image print chairs. To make sure it is different I would not scrape any content from the other pages and re-purpose it but rather write 3 new descriptions and pages, Header Tags, Title Tags, Alt Tags, etc...
Now a best practice would still be to utilize a rel=canonical tag on all of your pages so that tracking parameters and the such do not end up getting linked to and you end up splitting your authority among different pages in the SERP. For a good source on rel=canonical I would look here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Hope this helps and isn't too confusing. -
No problem, good luck with your website
-
I do not need to necessarily rank for every fabric. There are a few such as Disney characters or sports teams that I do need to rank for. My previous site had all the chairs on one page with a drop down and it just was not as "simple" to shop the item and it made specific tracking and "book keeping" a little more difficult. I like to have zoomed and multiple views for each chair when possible. I find this reduces the number of returns and customer inquiries when the customer can really see each product.
So, giving each product it's own page is for two reasons - the customer's shopping experience and for my tracking purposes.
As for the meta tags- I think your quote above is possibly one issue. The programming on my site automatically generates the meta tag based upon my product description.
By the way, Thank you for your time and expertise.
-
Do you need to rank on every fabric name for your product ? If not, you could just put one product page and have the fabric choice in a dropdown menu.
And for the meta description, allow me to quote SEOmoz Beginners guide to SEO : "Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines)".
-
Thank you Aeronet. I think most of my issues are within the description. Example: I may have a kids recliner in 50 different fabric choices. So the url, title, meta tag, and product name are all unique. However, the description is practically the same for each chair. You have given me a couple things to look into though such as the written/unwritten url. New to me but I will look into it as well as double check some other things.
When my newly designed site was released, I was unaware that the new program would generate a URL for each page based upon my product ID and not the established URL that I assigned it. Therefore all of my previous, 5 yr old and hard worked, URL's vanished. I did not discover this for 25 days and had to do a 301 redirect on a large chunk of my site. It's been quite a mess.
The number of duplicate content pages have been overwhelming, but I was just shocked to see the number suddenly drop to a 3rd of what it was yesterday. Still not sure what has happened to cause this.
-
If you use only one item in many variations (and want to keep your website that way), you must find ways to make each page as unique as possible.
You should look at :
- The url.
- The title.
- The meta description.
- The product name and description.
- The product image name and alt attribute.
- The breadcrumb trail.
And try to customize them to make each product page unique.
Also check if a page is reachable with differents urls, if your product is reachable by its rewritten and non rewritten url, that could cause the duplicated pages problem on your website.
(For example, www.yourwebsite.com/product.php?id=02 and www.yourwebsite.com/shiny-rewritten-product-url)
If that's the case, use rel=canonical or 301 redirect to your rewritten URLs, make a sitemap with the latest ones and your duplicate pages number should go down.
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
-
What's more valuable: new content or optimizing old content
We are a niche legacy print publication that's been around for close to 20 years. Recently, we combined several old sites in one new responsive site. We have over 7,000 articles -many of which are evergreen and can be repurposed when needed. Most of the old pieces although published, have not been optimized for SEO. However, as we create new pieces, we optimize them for search and social and they tend to get more organic traffic. Where we're torn is on how much we should balance our limited editorial resources between cleaning up and optimizing our extensive archive to improve our organic reach, vs. pumping out new original pieces each week. I realize that without a lot of data the answers will be varied - I guess I'm looking for a best practices approach for content publishers. If it helps at all, our main conversion goal is selling subscriptions to our print and digital publications. We know that organic traffic tends to be more engaged than our social referrals. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the magazine fulfilment business, it's tough to know which channels convert better. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | RicardoSalcedo0 -
Why am I getting all these duplicate pages?
This is going for basically all my pages, but my website has 3 'duplicates' as the rest just have 2 (no index) Why are these 3 variations counting as duplicate pages? http://www.homepage.com http://homepage.com http://www.hompage.com/index.php
Moz Pro | | W2GITeam0 -
Why did my rankings drop so fast?
Hi Mozzers, One of my clients have suffered from a sudden ranking loss that started beginning of August. A little background: My client is a big cleaning company that has many franchises nationwide and had very good rankings for the past few months. Generally the busiest time of the year is summer and the 4th quarter is the slowest. Organic Traffic generally drops by 5 to 10% between Q3 and Q4 of each year. 2 things have caught my attention while investigating these ranking losses The latest recent Update from the moz index evaluated the website's DA of 48 when in the summer we had a DA of 56. Never seen such a drop before!! My first question is how accurate is the moz index? How can I make sure this data is accurate? I am very surprised because we have been working hard on getting good quality links for the past year and a half. If the DA is accurate then that could explain the ranking loss Google updating its search engine to the Hummingbird version. Do you guys think this has anything to do with the drop in rankings? The content on the website is not the best but is fairly decent. I am still not sure how the ranking drop could be related to Hummingbird? I have also checked webmaster tools to see if I got hit somehow by penguin and it seems fine. Thanks mozzers
Moz Pro | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Clearing our on-page ranking reports?
Is there a way to "bulk delete" on-page ranking reports which are no longer relevant? I know we can delete them one at a time, but the reason I ask is that I've done a fair bit of work changing URL's, so the reports are often for old URL's which no longer exist. (yes, I made sure to do 301 redirects to the new ones!) Thanks in advance for any help!
Moz Pro | | koalatm0 -
Why did I not get on page analysis
I signed up last Friday for a 30 day trial and was hoping to get the on page analysis so I could get cracking on it. Moz said the crawl was done but I have no info for on page analysis which I find really useful when I have used this before. Any ideas and are any of the MOZ moderators able to get the system to perform one so I can make changes tonight for the MOZ crawl again tomorrow? Thanks Paul
Moz Pro | | ptrobson0 -
Where do these error 404 pages come from
Hi, I've got a list of about 12 url's in our 404 section on here which I'm confused about. The url's relate to Christmas so they have not been active for 9 months. Can anyone answer where the SeoMoz crawler found these url's as they are not linked to on the website. Thanks
Moz Pro | | SimmoSimmo0 -
Only crawling one page
Hi there, A campaign was crawling fine, but at the last crawl, for some reason, SEOmoz can only crawl one page... any ideas? If I run a custom crawl I still access all of the site's pages.
Moz Pro | | harryholmes0070 -
DmT Dropped
My question sounds stupid . But I had a good Moz rank for my Domain also Moz trust.It was in the high 400s for both..I was very happy with this score My DA also dropped considerably. There was not much of a reason i could see,In fact my page scores still were up there and never moved. But the domain scores plummeted. I had added a Blog to my site once i added the blog there were roughly 13 pages involved.Of these 13 pages i had problem errors ,notices ,and warnings for all the blog pages.I did not notice this until a couple days ago . The 13 errors were mostly duplicate description tags ,302 redirect ,and other small stuff like this .. like fl** Could these items listed above actually be the problem behind my scores all dropping like flies??** And with the update being only 3 days away if i repaiir these right away do you think i will get my scores back ?? Or will i have to wait for another 30 days ...I really dont want to be left standing with such a low score ..I already started making the repairs. Thank you all...
Moz Pro | | consumers0