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
-
What to do when Google automatically replaces the page title.
Hello Friends, Might you all are aware of the scenario when Google auto generates the snippets for search results. But nowadays I am seeing some changes like google is showing some specific words in the last of search results title for every page of my website. It looks Google is treating those words as the brand name. I have tried many things to solve this but unfortunately, nothing works for this. Does anyone see the same changes? Can anybody help me out with this or suggest me the reasons behind this.
Technical SEO | | Shalusingh1 -
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Sitemap duplicate title
At the moment we have a html sitemap which is pulling the same h1's/ titles. How big a problem is the duplicate content issue which is medium priority in the moz pro softaware? Would you recommend changes as sitemap page 1 - page 2 etc. Thanks
Technical SEO | | VUK-SEO0 -
To many links on page. Big or small issue for eCommerce
On my site I have around 3k pages and about 90 categories. Most of which have a sensible number of products but some have only a few products and some have loads. if I have say 40 links on the page ignoring the producand is it a big problem if I have more than 60 products on the page? Assuming a link limit per page of 100 user wise we have filters and sorts for thme to find what they breed without issue. But simply from an seo point of view how damaging would I be to have the 23 "to many links on page issues? Worth fixing by making two categories and splitting out products even tho it would hinder the user.
Technical SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on product pages?
Hi, I'm creating a bunch of product pages for courses for a university and I'm concerned about duplicate content penalties. While the page names are different and some of the test is different, much of the text is the same between pairs of pages. I.e. a BA and an MA in a particular subject (say 'hairdressing' will have the same subject descriptions, school introduction paragraph, industry overview paragraph etc. 1. Is this a problem? In a site with 100 pages, if sets of 2 pages have about 50% identical content... 2. If it is a problem, is there anything I can do, other than rewrite the text? 3. From a search perspective, would both pages show up in search results in searches related to 'hairdressing courses' 'study hairdressing' etc? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Descriptions missing from rankings associated with Google Place pages.
Can anyone help me figure out why my rankings that are associated with Google Place pages are missing descriptions? I have a number one result for the top searched keyword in my category but it just doesn't look the same without a description and I'm sure it's affecting CTR too.
Technical SEO | | glideagency0 -
Are all duplicate pages bad?
I just got my first Crawl Report for my forum and it said I have almost 9,000 duplicate pages. When I looked at a sample of them though I saw that many of them were "reply" links. By this I mean the "reply" button was clicked for a topic yet since the crawler was not a member, it just brought them to the login/register screen. Since all the topics would bring you to the same login page I'm assuming it counted all these "reply" links as duplicates. Should I just ignore these or is there some way to fix it? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Xee0