Should I add canonical tag on these pages?
-
Hi folks
I have some pages that used to rank pretty well..but I believe it is affected due to the content similarities.
Here is one the sub category pages
http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/2/Full-Body-Kits_Duraflex.html
the main category page
http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/Exterior_Body-Styling_Full-Body-Kits.html
These 2 links have very similar contents. The content are dynamic generated by template and I don't think I am able to change content for each individual pages since there are over 2000-3000 of them or more. Should I use canonical tag on the Duraflex.html page to give the main category page all the link juices and credits? There are about 20 other pages like this under this main category. Is it right to canonical all of them?
Please let me know if anyone has any suggestion.. thanks
-
Hi Cary - You've received some fantastic support from the Moz Community! Has your issue been resolved?
-
I guess it would help to randomise the featured products and the customer reviews, but I honestly think your biggest problem is this repeated block of text under the featured products where you're dynamically swapping out one or two words with your keyword, for example:
2011 Duraflex Audi A7 body kits are custom exterior accessories that can be installed to upgrade and revitalize a car’s {exterior look. After years of usage, the exterior parts on many automobiles starts to look outdated. Any damage to a car’s paint job or to the exterior components themselves can depreciate a automobile's value, making the use of body kit is just that important. A aerodynamic kits can transform a car look better, without ever changing any of the true mechanics of the vehicle.
Get rid of this and see if you're pages regain their previous positions in the SERPs.
Hope that helps,
Woody
-
Hi Woody
Thanks for your reply, - On my current category and sub category url- i have 8 to 20 products display in FEATURE PRODUCTS and search result- I can randomly pick 8-20 products out of 200+products from these category groups so it will show different products each time when customer enter these category pages.
In most categories. There are over 200+ products contain in these categories so there can be a lot of combinations. Not sure if this is good enough to get away from duplicate content check.
-
If I add canonical tag on the pages with duplicate content pages, can I remove the tag after I get the content issue fixed? Will that have any negative effects to those pages that had the tag implemented?
No. I would advise doing this.
My other question is , in order to make the page content different on every sub category pages do you guys think I can randomize my product displays along with the text content. Does the product display counted as part of the text content?
When you say randomize, what do you actually mean?
Displaying the same products in a random order would not count as unique content.
Yes the product display does count as part of the pages content.
I'm also not sure what you mean by randomizing text content, but it sounds like a bad idea as the whole idea is to create useful unique content to the product the page is related to, which is why I suggested targeting things like "urethane body kits" rather than Lexus urethane body kits as its more likely you can produce higher quality content on the former.
hope that helps,
Woody
-
Thanks guys..
If I add canonical tag on the pages with duplicate content pages, can I remove the tag after I get the content issue fixed? Will that have any negative effects to those pages that had the tag implemented?
My other question is , in order to make the page content different on every sub category pages do you guys think I can randomize my product displays along with the text content. Does the product display counted as part of the text content?
Keri-- if you ever need a car body kits- you now have a new connection established.
-
Honestly Keri, do you think the community would be capable of posting such things?
whistles
-
I just have to say I'm real thankful this is about car body kits. I saw the URL and was afraid I was going to need to add a NSFW disclaimer, until I saw the comments.
-
Hi Tom,
Great clarification/explanation of the use of canonical tags, but I think the problem is more related to these pages:
http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/Jeep/Exterior_Body-Styling_Full-Body-Kits.html
http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/Mercedes/Exterior_Body-Styling_Full-Body-Kits.html
http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/Subaru/Exterior_Body-Styling_Full-Body-Kits.html
In fact, all the content linked from the left nav here - http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/Exterior_Body-Styling_Full-Body-Kits.html
These couldn't be 301'd as they are valid pages in their own right, they just contain dupe content created by the template system.
Perhaps a side issue, unrelated to your sub-cat/main cat canonical fix, but a Panda issue all the same.
Thoughts?
Woody
-
Hi there
You've identified a duplicate content issue there and have come up with one way of dealing with it, so nice job.
If you gave this page: http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/2/Full-Body-Kits_Duraflex.html this canonical tag: rel="canonical" href="http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/Exterior_Body-Styling_Full-Body-Kits.html" /> then yes, you are telling Google to ignore the duplicate, don't index it or pass on any juice, and treat the URL in the canonical tag as the original and the one to rank.
You would have to do this again for the other pages as well, as you rightly pointed out.
An alternative would be to add the following code in the duplicate pages' header:
This basically tells Google not to index or give any credit to the page and to not index it. If it isn't indexed, it will not be flagged as duplicate.
The third option, and the one I recommend you looking at, is redirecting the duplicate URLs with a 301 code.
On this page http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/98/2/Full-Body-Kits_Duraflex.html you've got a lot of external links and a great page authority. If you're confident that these links are good quality and safe, if you 301 redirect the URL, those links and their strength will pass to the designated URL, as well as making sure only 1 non-duplicated URL is indexed. This way, you get the both worlds - you remove any duplicate pages, but keep the strength of the links pointing to those pages and send them to 1 URL. Here's a how to blog post on redirection.
Some more info can be found on in these useful blog posts:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical
Hope this helps make your decision!
-
Hey,
I think you have a bigger problem here.
The text at the bottom of every page is generated by template system dynamically replacing one variable only, thus resulting in very thin/dupe content. It's very probable that you've been hit with recent Google Panda updates.
Lexus body kits are add-ons and replacements that can be used to revise and revitalize a Lexus car’s outward appearance. After years of wear and tear, the Lexus exterior paneling on many Lexus cars begins to look old and, frankly, ugly. Any damage to a Lexus car’s paint job or to the Lexus exterior parts themselves can lower a Lexus vehicle’s resale value, making the use of Lexus bodykits just that much more important. ALexus bodykit can make a Lexus car appear newer, without ever changing any of the true mechanics of the vehicle.
Most aftermarket Lexus body kit upgrades come with replacements for several highly affected Lexus parts, Lexus bumpers and Lexus side skirts. These are the areas of a Lexus vehicle that are most typically damaged from regular driving, but they alone aren’t the only pieces that can be easily fixed. Other aftermarket Lexus body paneling can be used to customize a Lexus vehicle’s look, so Lexus body kits can sometimes be tailored to a driver’s specific needs. For an improved appearance that takes off the poor looks resulting from years of driving, a simple Lexus body kit can serve you well.
Lexus Cheap Body Kits Urethane Lexus Body Kits
etc
As a quick fix, you could try adding canonical tag from these sub cats into your main cat page but as long as you have this dynamic dupe content you're going to have a real problem. Open to hear others thoughts on this though.
I would certainly test this on one sub/main category before implementing across the whole site.
I would try to build out useful unique content around each body kit type (Urethane Body Kits, Cheap body kits, etc). This will give you less main categories to find useful content for, then mention the car makes and models within the content, such as suitable for: Lexus, Saab, etc.
Hope this helps
Woody
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
-
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
Moving from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce on WP. Should we redirect size pages into one page?
We are moving from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce on WP. On Bigcommerce, due to some bizarre reasoning the previous developer had 3 separate URLS for the same product in different sizes - S, M and L. Now we plan to have one product page where the sizes can be selected and 301 redirect the 3 urls to the new one. Is this advisable? Or should we just have 3 separate pages. OR should we have one of the sizes pages as the new page and then redirect the other 2 to this one? I ask this because the site has a LOT of ranking power and we do not want to jeopardise that.
On-Page Optimization | | MashBonigala0 -
Google Indexed = 35, 445 pages, Bing Indexed = 243 pages... Why?
Dear MozSquad, Can anyone check our site and let me know if there's anything super apparent that would cause Bing to treat us like a bum on the street? I recently made some structural changes which really helped with Google, but Bing didn't even budge. It's a lot harder to keep up with all the SEO initiatives I have in mind with it being a small start-up where I'm responsible for planning the entire Internet Marketing campaign, giving constant input on UX and site design, etc on top of 900 other things, so I figured it'd be a good time to use The Moz to help a brother out. Ideas? Domain: homeandgardendesignideas.com (yeah, I know it's a little long =P)
On-Page Optimization | | zDucketz0 -
Page Title
Hi All, I am wondering if you could help me please. I am getting the following result after I run my On-Page Analysis Avoid Multiple Page Title Elements _Easy fix _ <dl style="font-style: normal;"> <dt>Page titles</dt> <dd>"Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin -" and "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Web pages are meant to have a single title, and for both accessibility and search engine optimization reasons, we strongly recommend following this practice.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Remove all but a single page title element.</dd> </dl> Does this mean that i have 2 pages that are nearly identical or i should only name a page with one word? The reason i ask is because i have 1 page called "Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin" and another called "Aquashowers-Dublin Shower Repair" I don't have a page called "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin" (with the space inbetween the words and the hyphen) Any help would be great. Thanks again Aidan
On-Page Optimization | | aidanlawlor0 -
Missing meta descriptions on indexed pages, portfolio, tags, author and archive pages. I am using SEO all in one, any advice?
I am having a few problems that I can't seem to work out.....I am fairly new to this and can't seem to work out the following: Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂 1. I am missing alot of meta description tags. I have installed "All in One SEO" but there seems to be no options to add meta descriptions in portfolio posts. I have also written meta descriptions for 'tags' and whilst I can see them in WP they don't seem to be activated. 2. The blog has pages indexed by WP- called Part 2 (/page/2), Part 3 (/page/3) etc. How do I solve this issue of meta descriptions and indexed pages? 3. There is also a page for myself, the author, that has multiple indexes for all the blog posts I have written, and I can't edit these archives to add meta descriptions. This also applies to the month archives for the blog. 4. Also, SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links on my blog page (also indexed) and their consequent tags. This also applies to the author pages (myself ). How do I fix this? Thanks for your help 🙂 Regards Nadia
On-Page Optimization | | PHDAustralia680 -
Links to Product pages
Hello all, I am still rather new to SEO and learning a lot every day. I do have a question. On our product search result pages (example http://shop.ferguson.com/search/bathroom-lighting)
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
It is currently set up so the image, text, price etc of a product is linking to that product page. Our question is, if we were to link the image and the product name - will this be seen as two links to the same page? Is this a bad thing having multiple links to the same page? I searched around to see how other ecommerce sites have similar pages setup and it seems they link the image and also the product name, and the description is not click-able, which allows a user to "Highlight" the text (this is not possible on ours) Which would be to correct approach for SEO as well as User Interface, the way we have it set up, or by going with the method of the question I asked, Thank you for any information on this! Nick0 -
Add Rel Canonical to all pages on my site (Magento)
Can anyone guide me as to how to add the REL CANONICAL feature to every page on my website (Magento shopping cart) Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | lacx.com0 -
Optimally, how many times should the key word or phrase you are targeting for a particular page be mentioned or appear on that page?
Our marketing team is debating how many times the key phrase on each of our web store's product pages should include the word/phrase we are trying to be competitive with. Can you advise?
On-Page Optimization | | Glynlyon0