Canonicalization Issue | E-commerce
-
Hey everyone! How are you doing?
I spent this week trying to solve some technical issues on my website. However i am having trouble with Duplicate Content. I came to the conclusion that canonicalization is a great solution to this problem, however, i am having trouble implementing it.
The duplicate problem arises from the fact that for each product i have several colors or different attributes.
For example. I have the category "Construction Clips" and then links to "Color" in which the user can choose White or Sandstone. The content is almost identical for both of them, the only thing that changes is the color. This scenarios repeats many times throughout my webcommerce site. And is throwing me off many Duplicate Content errors.
I cannot use the canonicalization in the White or Sandstone page, because is a product page, it doesnt let me add or change anything on the header. http://aceromart.com/Clip-Glamet-Blanco.aspx
I dont intend to rank well on most product pages, my priority is that i dont want duplicate errors on my website. What is the best solution for this conundrum?
Regards!!!
In advance, i thank you for your opinions!
-
I am analyzing of noindexing them because they are webpages that only show the price of that particular combination of products.
I cannot change the platform for ecommerce because it would require a heavy investment both in time and capital.
I will try to write some content in order to differentiate them enough. Although i dont exactly know how much of a content is considered a duplicate.
Do you know a guideline for this topic?
Regards,
Thanks!
-
Also, should you do option #2 and your content system appends the URL with the "variant" (ex. ?product.php&whitestone), make sure the system is updated to post a concantation URL in the header.
-
Strange that you can't update the header to add canonicals. Personally I'd say you should then add some written content about the products to differentiate them. Otherwise that's a pretty bare looking page to me except for all the links. Or, if you don't care about them ranking & don't want to invest in copy, NoIndex them and just let people find them through site navigation instead of search. But i'd go with the expanded copy.
-
One way to handle this is to change the content between the pages (the descriptions, titles, etc.) enough that you are no longer seeing the duplicate content problem.
Another option would be to pull the products (white, sandstone) into ONE product page that has a dropdown or menu selector to choose color. This would probably be less work than changing tons of descriptions, but it also may depend on your ecommerce platform. most platforms have a "variant" selector on product pages as this is a common problem (think: tshirts, clothing, shoe sizes, etc.).
Hope that's of some help!
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 is best practice for fixing urls that have duplicate content, non-static and other issues?
Hi, I know there are several good answers regarding duplicate content issues on this website already, however I have a question that involves the best way to avoid negative SEO impacts if I change the urls for an ecommerce site. Basically a new client has the following website http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk and I notice that it suffers from duplicate content due to the http://www version and the non www version of the pages - this seems quite easy to fix using the guidance on this website. However I notice that the product page urls are far from ideal in that they have several issues including:- (a) they are mostly too long (b) don't include the keyword terms (in terms of best practice) (c) they don't use Static URLS An example of one these product urls would be http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk/plant-details.php?name=Autumn Glory&p_genus=Hebe&code=heagl&category=hebe I'd like to address these issues, but the pages rank highly for the products themselves, therefore my question is what would you recommend I do to fix the urls without risking the high positions that many of these product pages have? thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Windows Acces used for e-commerce site - help needed
Hello everybody, I am working on this e-commerce website built on windows access and it's a nightmare to change the html content on it.has anyone used it before? It doesn't allow me to change the content for the html tags even though it should and i don't have a clue about what to do. Thanks oscar
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Too many on-page links vs. UX issue
I am having an issue with many of our pages having too many on-page links. I have gotten many of them below the 100 page limit that is suggested and I understand this is not a critical factor with SEO, but my issue is this: Many important pages I am trying to optimize are buried at a "3rd" level which is actually not accessible from the home page navigation dropdown due to our outdated CMS. I am trying to decide if we should develop our site to display these pages on-hover from the main navigation. This would make a lot of sense since users would find these pages easier, however adding this functionality would increase on-page links by a lot more. So in your opinion, would it be worth it to spend the money to have this functionality developed? Or would it end up hurting our SEO standings?
Technical SEO | | isret_efront0 -
Change e-commerce platform and domain name SEO issue.
Hi, We are looking to switch from Bigcommerce to either Magento or Shopify, but we have some concern about the redirecting of all URL and not sure where to help. Also, we are looking to remove "hyphen" www.ide-home.com.au in our domain name, again it is all about 301 redirecting. We need SEO expert to help us with all changes that minimize the effect on Google. Does anyone can suggest which company or who we can ask for help? Thanks very much.
Technical SEO | | ide-home020 -
I have 300 rel caonical issues with my magentogo store irisscottprints.com.
I can't find answer in mgo blogs. what if anything specifically should I do with these issues? I have control over meta tags but not easy to edit html in the admin. I've read some posts here but still confused. Answers would be great but if there is a primer on the subject and it relates to what is editable in Mgo store I'd love to figure it out myself:) Help.
Technical SEO | | RedTrout0 -
RSS Hacking Issue
Hi Checked our original rss feed - added it to Google reader and all the links go to the correct pages, but I have also set up the RSS feed in Feedburner. However, when I click on the links in Feedburner (which should go to my own website's pages) , they are all going to spam sites, even though the title of the link and excerpt are correct. This isn't a Wordpress blog rss feed either, and we are on a very secure server. Any ideas whatsoever? There is no info online anywhere and our developers haven't seen this before. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kerry220 -
WordPress Duplicate Content Issues
Everyone knows that WordPress has some duplicate content issues with tags, archive pages, category pages etc... My question is, how do you handle these issues? Is the smart strategy to use robots meta and add no follow/ no index category pages, archive pages tag pages etc? By doing this are you missing out on the additional internal links to your important pages from you category pages and tag pages? I hope this makes sense. Regards, Bill
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0