Are duplicate item titles harmful to my ecommerce site?
-
Hello everyone,
I have an online shopping site selling, amongst other items, candles. We have lots of different categories within the LED candles category.
One route a customer can take is homepage > LED candles > Tealights.
Within the tealights category we have 7 different products which vary only in colour. It is necessary to create separate products for each colour since we have fantastic images for each colour.
To target different keywords, at present we have different titles (hence different link texts, different URLs and different H1 tags) for each colour, for example "Battery operated LED candles, amber", "Flameless candles, red" and "LED tealights, blue".
I was wondering if different titles to target different keywords is a good idea. Or, is it just confusing to the customer and should I just stick with a generic item title which just varies by colour (eg. "LED battery candles, colour")?
If I do the latter, am I at risk of getting downranked by Google since I am duplicating the product titles/link texts/URLs/H1 tags/img ALTs? (the description and photos for each colour are unique).
Sorry if this is a little complicated - please ask and I can clarify anything...because I really want to give the best customer experience but still preserve my Google ranking.
I have attached screenshots of the homepage and categories to clarify, feel free to go on the site live too.
Thank you so much,
Pravin
-
In my opinion, you still run a small risk of having items filtered out due to being too similar. If you feel the balance of unique content compared to duplicate is much more on the unique side - you may be ok. You may have less risk of being "penalized" compared to just filtered. Meaning your domain as a whole may not face penalty, but some of those pages still might have difficulty showing up due to being too similar for a given search.
A decent way to explore this is to do searches for phrases that might be exclusive to those pages that have similar content. Do they all show up? Then you are probably ok. How about an exact phrase match using quotes around the search query. Do some testing and see if you are hitting a filter or not.
-
Yes the whole copy and customer reviews are unique. The only thing that's duplicated is MOST of the title, img ALTs, img URLs, URL, H1 tag and link text throughout the site. I say most because these attributes would vary only in colour.
-
Hi Pravin,
Is there any content on these pages that makes them unique? Is there a greater portion of unique content compared to this duplicated content?
Owen
-
Hi Owen,
Thanks for the reply.
I meant item titles as in what I name the products in the ecommerce platform, NOT the meta titles which are unique for all my products.
If the item titles (and hence URLs, image ALTs, H1 tags etc as they are automatically set by the ecommerce platform) are duplicated (and NOT the meta titles) would it still make a difference and am I at risk of getting downranked / penalised?
Thanks again for your help,
Pravin
-
If you want to increase the chance of each unique combination being found via organic search, unique titles would be the way to go. Duplicate titles might increase the chances of Google filtering one ore more of your pages out of the search results in favor of a similar result from your site.
Another solution would be to choose the most relevant item in the set and use a canonical tag to the different color combinations. That way someone searching can find your page and decide from there if they want a different color but you wont face the duplicate content issue.
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 would be the best course of action to nullify negative effects of our website's content being duplicated (Negative SEO)
Hello, everyone About 3 months ago I joined a company that deals in manufacturing of transportation and packaging items. Once I started digging into the website, I noticed that a lot of their content was "plagiarized". I use quotes as it really was not, but they seemed to have been hit with a negative SEO campaign last year where their content was taken and being posted across at least 15 different websites. Literally every page on their website had the same problem - and some content was even company specific (going as far as using the company's very unique name). In all my years of working in SEO and marketing I have never seen something at the scale of this. Sure, there are always spammy links here and there, but this seems very deliberate. In fact, some of the duplicate content was posted on legitimate websites that may have been hacked/compromised (some examples include charity websites. I am wondering if there is anything that I can do besides contacting the webmasters of these websites and nicely asking for a removal of the content? Or does this duplicate content not hold as much weight anymore as it used to. Especially since our content was posted years before the duplicate content started popping up. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Hasanovic0 -
Google suddenly stops ranking a page for a "keyword" with same "keyword" in title tag. Low competition.
Hi all, We have released our next version of product called like "software 11", which have thousands of searches every month. So we have just added this same keyword "software 11" as page title suffix to one of the top ranking pages. Obviously this is the page has been added suddenly with "software 11" at page title, multiple header tags and 1 mention in paragraph. Google ranked it for 2 days and suddenly stopped showing this page in entire results for the same keyword we optimised the page for. Why does it happened? Does Google think that we are overdoing with this page and ignoring it? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Technical : Duplicate content and domain name change
Hi guys, So, this is a tricky one. My server team just made quite a big mistake :We are a big We are a big magento ecommerce website, selling well, with about 6000 products. And we are about to change our domaine name for administrative reasons. Let's call the current site : current.com and the future one : future.com Right, here is the issue Connecting to the search console, I saw future.com sending 11.000 links to current.com. At the same time DA was hit by 7 points. I realized future.com was uncorrectly redirected and showed a duplicated site or current.com. We corrected this, and future.com now shows a landing page until we make the domain name change. I was wondering what is the best way to avoid the penalty now and what can be the consequences when changing domain name. Should I set an alias on search console or something ? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kepass0 -
Algorithmically penalized site
I have been doing SEO for years, but luckily have never had a client penalized or had to go through that. I see everyone talking about it at conferences and know the absolute basics of recovery, but just had someone come to me that was algorithmically penalized about two years ago. They have no actual data to show me a date and they couldn't tell me a specific date. According to them, their SEO disappeared and wouldn't give them access to the analytics. They are definitely showing just about every red flag with anchor tags and low trust links and tons of duplicate content. Just about everything. I realize you don't have the deep data to go by, but are there cases when it is just better to start over from scratch. They have literally thousands of bad links and strange site pages that they say they weren't even aware of. Whether they were or not I guess isn't the point now, but I have heard rumors that if you start over, Google will still figure it out and follow you with the penalty. Is this true or documented? Don't want to potentially recommend that if that is something that generally happens to bad offenders. Happy to do the work and try to resolve their issues, but it is a lot of work and is going to be expensive and want to present other options. Thanks and any thoughts suggestions are appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Duplicate Content due to Panda update!
I can see that a lot of you are worrying about this new Panda update just as I am! I have such a headache trying to figure this one out, can any of you help me? I have thousands of pages that are "duplicate content" which I just can't for the life of me see how... take these two for example: http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=18753 http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=31241 My campaign crawler is telling me these are duplicate content pages because of the same title (which that I can see) and because of the content (which I can't see). Can anyone see how Google is interpreting these two pages as duplicate content?? Stupid Panda!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Closing down site and redirecting its traffic to another
OK - so we currently own two websites that are in the same industry. Site A is our main site which hosts real estate listings and rentals in Canada and the US. Site B hosts rentals in Canada only. We are shutting down site B to concentrate solely on Site A, and will be looking to redirect all traffic from Site B to Site A, ie. user lands on Toronto Rentals page on Site B, we're looking to forward them off to Toronto Rentals page on Site A, and so on. Site A has all the same locations and property types as Site B. On to the question: We are trying to figure out the best method of doing this that will appease both users and the Google machine. Here's what we've come up with (2 options): When user hits Site B via Google/bookmark/whatever, do we: 1. Automatically/instantly (301) redirect them to the applicable page on Site A? 2. Present them with a splash page of sorts ("This page has been moved to Site A. Please click the following link <insert anchor="" text="" rich="" url="" here="">to visit the new page.").</insert> We're worried that option #1 might confuse some users and are not sure how crawlers might react to thousands of instant redirects like that. Option #2 would be most beneficial to the end-user (we're thinking) as they're being notified, on page, of what's going on. Crawlers would still be able to follow the URL that is presented within the splash write-up. Thoughts? We've never done this before. It's basically like one site acquiring another site; however, in this case, we already owned both sites. We just don't have time to take care of Site B any longer due to the massive growth of Site A. Thanks for any/all help. Marc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | THB0 -
How to know if a link in a directory will be good for my site?
Hi! Some time ago, a friend of my added our site to a directory. I did not notice it until today, when in the search results for my domain name, the directory came in the first page, in the four position. My friend wrote a nice article, describing our bussiness, and the page has a doFollow link. Looking at the metrics of that directory, I found the following: Domain Authority: 70; main page authority: 76; linking domain roots: 1383; total links: 94663 (several anchor texts); facebook shares: 26; facebook likes: 14; tweets: 20; Google +1: 15. The directory accept a free article about a company, does not review it before it is published, but look for duplicated articles representing spam; so one company can only have one listing (in theory). Is there any formula to know if a directory is safe to publish a doFollow link? If they don't review the link I would say is not a good signal, but is there any other factors to take into account?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | te_c0 -
Content box (on page content) and titles Google over-optimization penalty?
We have a content box at the bottom of our website with a scroll bar and have posted a fair bit of content into this area (too much for on page) granted it is a combination of SEO content (with links to our pages) and informative but with the over optimization penalty coming around I am a little scared if this will result in a problem for us. I am thinking of adopting the process of this website HERE with the content behind a more information button that drops down, would this be better as it could be much more organised and we will be swopping out to more helpful information than the current 50/50 (SEO – helpful content) or will it be viewed the same and we might as well leave it as is and lower the amount of repetition and links in the content. Also we sell printed goods so our titles may be a bit over the top but they are bring us a lot of converting traffic but again I am worried about the new Google release this is an example of a typical title (only an example not our product page) Banner Printing | PVC Banners | Outdoor Banners | Backdrops | Vinyl Banners | Banner Signs Thank you for any help with these matters.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0