Many items with similar descriptions showing up as duplicate page titles
-
Hi,
We are just a small company trying to understand this seo business. :O) I hope you will give us your input on how we look and how we can improve.
Each week I go down the seomoz crawl and change the duplicate page titles it increases the duplicate page content. Then the next week it seems to find other titles that have been fixed that are afluwie now. Please help. We are a bead company and alot of our products have a similar description but have different colors and items numbers. Could you please advise me on how to fix these errors and increase our ranking?
All the Best,
Beth
-
Thank you for the info. We are just learning and testing using the language of seo. Your answers have supported the direction we felt we needed to go but wanted a second opinion from someone who understood the whole picture. All the Best... Beth
-
Canonical is most effective in reducing the number of pages indexed. Doesn't address any issues related to unique content to the degree you need to add a lot more unique content to each page you do want indexed.
-
Thank you very much for responding to our question... I was afraid you might say that... is there not a way we could use the famous "canonical" (crossed fingers) to help?
-
Beth,
Unfortunately when you've got a lot of products where the only difference between SKUs is color and item number, it means you need to artificially implement uniqueness. This requires becoming creative with product names and descriptions. Since I see you've already got product names covered fairly well, let's talk about descriptions.
If you go to a sample page, such as for the Charlotte Cut Beads, look at the page both from a "length of description" aspect as well as an "overall content" aspect.
That very short description is quite likely to be seen as at least partly, if not mostly duplicate from other descriptions on the site. And at the same time, the total weight of unique content compared the the entirety of the page (with the header, side navigation and footer being replicated across many pages on the site) and you have a bigger problem in hoping to get this designated as a unique page.
Even though it may seem like a burden to have to produce paragraphs of content for a single product page, without that extended unique description for every product, you'll always have problems.
You may be better off changing how your site works than trying to struggle with the current issues.
For example, when I go to the Charlotte Cuts category page, maybe you should have this be the single page people go to so they can choose which products to add to their cart - eliminating the final individual product "details" page (since there really are no "details" on those.
Then, I'd recommend adding a couple paragraphs of well written and optimized content for that category page.
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 Title Tags
Hi, Are these 2 title tags different enough? Notice only the 's' on Templates is switched <colgroup><col width="559"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Studio33
| Invoice Templates | Invoice Template | invoicing Software | Invoice Software Invoice Template | Invoice Templates | invoicing Software | Invoice Software | Thanks0 -
Missing page titles
Does anyone know why my SeoMoz crawl reads my page titles differen't to what they truly are on my active site? I changed my pages titles and optimised them several months ago. Is my old page titles still been crawled rather than the new ones how do i fix this is?
Technical SEO | | gimes0 -
Duplicate Page Warnings, hkey and repetitive URLs
Hi, we just put our association's site in SEO Moz so we can tackle SEO and we received thousands of duplicate page content and duplicate title warnings. I searched the forum before asking 🙂 Appreciate some guidance on how many things are wrong with the URL's below that are getting flagged as duplicate page content. 1. Does the repetition of the page title and section hurt SEO? 2. Does the iMIS15 in the URL (the server) detract from relevant ranking? 3. From the forum, it looks like canonical tags should be added to the version of the page that starts with .....?hkey (is there a way to predict and "canonize" these? Or recommendations?) http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx?hkey=6d821afa-e3aa-4bef-bafa-2453238d12c6 http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx Thank you.
Technical SEO | | lyndas0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0 -
How can i see the pages that cause duplicate content?
SEOmoz PRO is giving me back duplicate content errors. However, i don't see how i can get a list of pages that are duplicate to the one shown. If i don't know which pages/urls cause the issue i can't really fix it. The only way would be placing canonical tags but that's not always the best solution. Is there a way to see the actual duplicate pages?
Technical SEO | | 5MMedia0 -
Duplicate Page Content Lists the same page twice?
When checking my crawl diagnostics this morning I see that I have the error Duplicate page content. It lists the exact same url twice though and I don't understand how to fix this. It's also listed under duplicate page title. Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Does this have anything to do with a 301 redirect here? Why does it have http;// twice? Thanks all! | http://www.charlottepersonalassistant.com/ | http://http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/ |
Technical SEO | | eidna220 -
How do I eliminate duplicate url, duplicate title issues using Joomla CMS?
We have a site using Joomla CMS, integrated with Jreviews and Jomsocial. Utilizing ACE SEF to generate Dynamic URL structure. Our issue is that we are recieving multiple instances of duplicate url's and duplicate titles due to the way joomla is working with jreviews for all our 7,000+ business listings. Site is already ranked for many broad/national keywords, concerned that our state and local rankings are limited by these errors. How can we prevent this from happening without re-writing the entire website?
Technical SEO | | mdmcn0 -
How do you add a description to the Meta Description area to Tag Pages in Wordpress? This way I do not get the errors: "Missing Meta Description Tag" from SEOMoz Bot? Thanks!
I tried to add descriptions to my tags in Wordpress (well actually one to test), but I still keep getting the "Missing Meta Description Tag" error. Any suggestions on how to fix this in Wordpress? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jhblogger0