Duplicate Content - Products
-
When running a report it says we have lots of duplicate content. We are a e-commerce site that has about 45,000 sku's on the site. Products can be in multiple departments on the site. So the same products can show up on different pages of the site. Because of this the reports show multiple products with duplicate content. Is this an issue with google and site ranking? Is there a way to get around this issue?
-
Hi Patrick - Did James answer your question?
-
jamesscaggs has got it covered but I wanted to post this:
Whiteboard Friday - Faceted Navigation
-
Yes it can be an issue. You should be implementing rel=canonical tags. If you use the rel=canonical tags you can tell Google which pages are "duplicates" and which is the original version. For ecommerce I usually recommend making the most product page in the most relevant category as the canonical and the other versions in other categories/subcategories are not canonical.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Email and landing page duplicate content issue?
Hi Mozers, my question is, if there is a web based email that goes to subscribers, then if they click on a link it lands on a Wordpress page with very similar content, will Google penalize us for duplicate content? If so is the best workaround to make the email no index no follow? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane770 -
Could a dropdown list of products dilute the page content?
Hi all, On our site, due to the fact we only have some 120 or so products split across 5 different categories we have a dropdown menu that displays all of the products in the menu. Forgetting usability for a moment, my question is whether by having links to all of products appear on each and every page (because they are in the main menu), are we diluting the content on the page. For example, if I take a particular product - the main phrase I want that page to be discovered for is "perspex sheet". This phrase does appear in the H1, H2 and within the main description of the product - but, as mentioned, each of our pages has some 120+ internal links due to the menu which contain all sorts of product names that arent relevant to "perspex sheet". The Moz report does flag a Medium issue on every page due to the number of internal links. I don't know whether I'm making a fuss about nothing, or whether this does have some serious side effects. It's an eCommerce site so of course im nervous of making changes that could have an adverse affect on our rankings. I thought there used to be a tool on Moz that showed what phrases a page was optimised for but i can no longer find that tool. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards,
Technical SEO | | SimplyPlastic
Al0 -
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Https Duplicate Content
My previous host was using shared SSL, and my site was also working with https which I didn’t notice previously. Now I am moved to a new server, where I don’t have any SSL and my websites are not working with https version. Problem is that I have found Google have indexed one of my blog http://www.codefear.com with https version too. My blog traffic is continuously dropping I think due to these duplicate content. Now there are two results one with http version and another with https version. I searched over the internet and found 3 possible solutions. 1 No-Index https version
Technical SEO | | RaviAhuja
2 Use rel=canonical
3 Redirect https versions with 301 redirection Now I don’t know which solution is best for me as now https version is not working. One more thing I don’t know how to implement any of the solution. My blog is running on WordPress. Please help me to overcome from this problem, and after solving this duplicate issue, do I need Reconsideration request to Google. Thank you0 -
Is anyone using Canonicalization for duplicate content
Hi i am trying to find out if anyone is using Canonicalization for duplicate content on a joomla site. I am using joomla 1.5 and trying to find either a module or manually how to sort this out as i have over 300 pages of duplicate content because i am not using this technique any help and advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Duplicate content issue with trailing / ?
Hi ,I did a SEOmoz Crawl Test and found most pages show twice, for example: A: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk B: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk/ I've checked Google Analytics and 90% of organic search traffic arrives on the URLs with the trailing slash (B). Question 1: Can I assume I've a duplicate content problem? Question 2: Is it best to do 301 redirects from the 'non trailing slash' pages to the 'trailing slash pages'? Question 3: For some reason every web page has a '/index.php' in it (see A&B) above. No idea why. Should it be a SEO concern? Kind regards and thank you in advance Nigel
Technical SEO | | Richard5550 -
Duplicate Content - Just how killer is it?
Yesterday I received my ranking report and was extremely disappointed that my high-priority pages dropped in rank for a second week in a row for my targeted keywords. This is after running them through the gradecard and getting As for each of them on the keywords I wanted. I looked at my google webmaster tools and saw new duplicate content pages listed, which were the ones I had just modified to get my keyword targeting better. In my hastiness to work on getting the keyword usage up, I neglected to prevent these descriptions from coming up when viewing the page with filter parameters, sort parameters and page parameters... so google saw these descriptions as duplicate content (since myurl.html and myurl.html?filter=blah are seen as different). So my question: is this the likely culprit for some pretty drastic hits to ranking? I've fixed this now, but are there any ways to prevent this in the future? (I know _of _canonical tags, but have never used them, and am not sure if this applies in this situation) Thanks! EDIT: One thing I forgot to ask as well: has anyone inflicted this upon themselves? And how long did it take you to recover?
Technical SEO | | Ask_MMM0 -
Duplicate Content and Canonical use
We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications. Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course. Cheers Martin
Technical SEO | | Martin_S0
