How can you avoid duplicate content within your own e-commerce website
-
One of the e-commerce websites I am working on is giving me a lot of duplicate content errors because all of the products are the same, just different sizes.
Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem or should i just ignore it?
Someone in the office brought up the idea to just use an i frame for all product descriptions.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
-
Short and sweet answer
- rel canonical the pages where you sort by ( siz, price , etc ) even for product you classify by color .( more reading )
- If the pages are split up in to separate pages add rel=prev and rel=next to them ( more reading )
-
We are talking five pages - this isn't going to get you penalized. Please consider my suggestion above. You must know why someone would buy the small versus large size and you can write we recommend this size for people looking for best value and who have this type of requirement etc...
-
In that case i would rel=canonical to one version of the product, preferably the most popular size.
I'm not sure about the system you have used to create the site, but you could potentially have single page with a drop down allow users to select the sizes/flavours etc which updates the price on the fly.
-
There is no way I can create 1 page for all of the products. They already have different flavors and all the prices are different. I can definitely stress the sizes for title and meta tags, but unfortunately all of the directions are the same, descriptions for product flavors the same, and customer benefits are the same. If you guys want take a look at the website it is www.petsspark.com. And here is the link to the products http://www.petsspark.com/Tear-Stain-Eliminators-s/1822.htm
-
There is no way I can create 1 page for all of the products. They already have different flavors and all the prices are different. I can definitely stress the sizes for title and meta tags, but unfortunately all of the directions are the same, descriptions for product flavors the same, and customer benefits are the same. If you guys want take a look at the website it is www.petsspark.com. And here is the link to the products http://www.petsspark.com/Tear-Stain-Eliminators-s/1822.htm
-
The easiest solution when the products are the same but different sizes is to rel=canonical to one of the sizes from the duplicate pages of differing size options.
The best solution however is to create one page with all sizes on the page, this is a bit more difficult to do as requires some programming, design etc. but it is worth the effort from both an SEO and UX perspective
check out the folloowing article for info on rel=canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalizationHope that helps
-
You need to stress the different sizes in the Title, Meta, H1, Product Description and H1 tag. Also, if possible I would spend the time to write about the use cases for each individual size. The iframe is a bad idea and would not help at all.
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
-
International SEO And Duplicate Content Within The Same Language
Hello, Currently, we have a .com English website serving an international clientele. As is the case we do not currently target any countries in Google Search Console. However, the UK is an important market for us and we are seeing very low traffic (almost entirely US). We would like to increase visibility in the UK, but currently for English speakers only. My question is this - would geo-targeting a subfolder have a positive impact on visibility/rankings or would it create a duplicate content issue if both pieces of content are in English? My plan was: 1. Create a geo-targeted subfolder (website.com/uk/) that copies our website (we currently cannot create new unique content) 2. Go into GSC and geo-target the folder to the UK 3. Add the following to the /uk/ page to try to negate duplicate issues. Additionally, I can add a rel=canonical tag if suggested, I just worry as an already international site this will create competition between pages However, as we are currently only targeting a location and not the language at this very specific point, would adding a ccTLD be advised instead? The threat of duplicate content worries me less here as this is a topic Matt Cutts has addressed and said is not an issue. I prefer the subfolder method as to ccTLD's, because it allows for more scalability, as in the future I would like to target other countries and languages. Ultimately right now, the goal is to increase UK traffic. Outside of UK backlinks, would any of the above URL geo-targeting help drive traffic? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Blog on subdomain of e-commerce site
Hi guys. I've got an e-commerce site which we have very little control over. As such, we've created a subdomain and are hosting a WordPress install there, instead. This means that all the great content we're putting out (via bespoke pages on the subdomain) are less effective than if they were on the main domain. I've looked at proxy forwarding, but unfortunately it isn't possible through our servers, leaving the only option I can see being permenant redirects... What would be the best solution given the limitations of the root site? I'm thinking of wildcard rewrite rules (eg. link site.com/blog/articleTitle to blog.site.com/articleTitle) but I'm wondering if there's much of an SEO benefit in doing this? Thanks in advance for everyone's help 🙂
Technical SEO | | JAR8970 -
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 -
How to avoid duplicate content on internal search results page?
Hi, according to Webmaster Tools and Siteliner our website have an above-average amount of duplicate content. Most of the pages are the search results pages, where it finds only one result. The only difference in this case are the TDK, H1 and the breadcrumbs. The rest of the layout is pretty static and similar. Here is an example for two pages with "duplicate content": https://soundbetter.com/search/Globo https://soundbetter.com/search/Volvo Edit: These are legitimate results that happen to have the same result. In this case we want users to be able to find the audio engineers by 'credits' (musicians they've worked with). Tags. We want users to rank for people searching for 'engineers who worked with'. And searching for two different artists (credit tags) returns this one service provider, with different urls (the tag being the search parameter) hence the duplicate content. I guess every e-commerce/directory website faces this kind of issue. What is the best practice to avoid duplicate content on search results page?
Technical SEO | | ShaqD1 -
Many Errors on E-commerce website mainly Duplicate Content - Advice needed please!
Hi Mozzers, I would need some advice on how to tackle one of my client’s websites. We have just started doing SEO for them and after moz crawled the e-commerce it has detected: 36 329 Errors – 37496 warnings and 2589 Notices all going up! Most of the errors are due to duplicate titles and page content but I cannot identify where the duplicate pages come from, these are the links moz detected of the Duplicate pages (unfortunately I cannot add the website for confidentiality reasons) : • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_2=&products_per_00&page=2 • www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&page=2 With these URLs it is quite hard to identify which pages need to be canonicalize. And this is jsut an example out of thousands on this website. If anyone would have any advice on how to fix this and how to tackle 37496 errors on a website like this that would be great. Thank you for your time, Lyam
Technical SEO | | AlphaDigital0 -
Shopify duplicate content issue
We recently moved out site to shopify but now have a duplicate content issue as we have the same products in different collections. I have added canonical code to get rid of this but my webmaster tools still shows hundreds of duplicate pages. How can I tell if the code I added is working? How long will it take for google to recognise this and drop the duplicates from their index and is this likely to have a significant impact on SERPS? Our we page is www.devoted2vintage.co.uk. Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | devoted2vintage1 -
How to get rid of duplicate content
I have duplicate content that looks like http://deceptionbytes.com/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&link=932fea0640143bf08fe157d3570792a56dcc1284 - however I have 50 of these all with different numbers on the end. Does this affect the search engine optimization and how can I disallow this in my robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | Mishelm1 -
Duplicate Content on 2 Sites - Advice
We have one client who has an established eCommerce Site and has created another site which has the exact same content which is about to be launched. We want both sites to be indexed but not be penalised for duplicate content. The sites have different domains The sites have the same host We want the current site to be priority, so the new site would not be ranking higher in SERPs. Any advice on setting up canonical, author tags, alternate link tag etc Thanks Rich
Technical SEO | | SEOLeaders0