How to provide product information without duplicate content?
-
Hi all,
I have an ecommerce website with approx 400 products, these are quite technical products and i use to have helpful information about the products on the product pages...
My SEO company told me to remove all this, as i had lots of duplicate content issues...
I have since had content writers re-write all product descriptions (about 250 words per product)... and now i am trying to figure out a way of getting the "helpful" information back on but in some kind of dynamic way...
There is basically about 5 or 6 blocks of information, that can be added to each product page, these overlap hundreds of products.
i was thinking of perhaps creating a separate static page for each block of useful information, and putting links on the product pages to this...
however, ideally i would prefer to not keep sending customers to other pages... so wanted to see if others had come across similar issues themselves and how they went about having this "content" available to the user but in such a way it was not duplicate content...
Please note using images would not be any good here, as the content varies in size but most of it is text based...
regards
James
-
Hi James,
That will probably do it. If you want to avoid having to fiddle with the paging code etc check out something like (grabbed the first link I saw) http://www.jquery4u.com/function-demos/ajax/
Loading content with ajax/jquery is pretty straightforward
-
Thanks for all the replies, seems Andy is on the right track... so i had a look around at some scripts that might perform what i need... i came across this: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/ajaxpaginate/index.htm
I could remove the paginations, and change the direct links to images, so in my limited understanding that would leave very little content for google to crawl, and there fore get rid of any duplicate content issues... does this seem correct?
please advise
-
I think Andy’s idea to use java script to pull the information is fairly a good idea but if the major problem is only the duplication of content on the product pages I would suggest you to add UGC areas on the product section and allow people to leave their comments about the product... make the UGC area crawlable to Google... when Google will come to crawl the page they will find different comments on each page which will allow the product page to stay unique as far as the content is concern!
Controlling UGC is the issue as people sometime drop shitty comments so it is better to have a moderation instead of allowing the comments to go live directly.
-
As Andy says you could pull the information into a popup/lightbox/div using javascript and source it all from the same url, so should do the trick.
Just thinking out loud now, but it might be worth testing putting the generic texts back into some of the product pages and seeing what happens. 250 word unique texts for each product might be enough to make the moz crawler (and the search engines) see enough value and difference on each page for it not to be an issue anymore. You could test in a single category for example and cross check against analytics and ranking data to see what happens.
-
As far as I am aware that is not how canonical tags are designed to be used. That use would imply that the category page itself is where the original detail is found and this is not the case for most shopping carts, which are just "lists" of products and are not product details.
This use would just confuse matters further as it is saying "don't rank this product, rank the category page because that's where this info is from" which is not what is needing to be done here.
-
You could probably consider using canonical tags for products of the same category? Get the product pages to point to the main category page. Since if they're part of the same category, the technical information will be mostly overlapping.
This way you can have all your technical information present on your page, but at the same time not be penalised for having duplicated content and making yourself searchable for the different category of products.
Hope this helps!
- Alex
-
best way i've found is to use something like facebox to draw in information from another page using javascript, google just see's it as a link to that page.
you can also do a similar thing without the pop up box, im sure someone here can remember it's name / method.
twiddles thumbs look here they come
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
-
Ecommerce web design read more toggle vs menu link on home page and product pages
Hello, We have an Ecommerce store. We have a lot of content on the home page and product pages and we are going back and forth between which one to use between a toggle "Read More" "Show Less" toggle for each section and a anchor linked menu. We have long product pages We're thinking a read more toggle is more appropriate for category descriptions so that they can go at the top of the category and not take up space. But the read more toggle with lots of content scrolls the page down and doesn't scroll it back up when you hit "show less" We're leaning towards a linked menu for the home pages and product pages for this reason, but an accordion type set of toggles would look nicer. What do you recommend, and how have you set up your read more toggles if they have lots of info so that they are not confusing? Are there other options? ' Not looking for code (I can do that) I'm looking for ideas on the cleanest home page, category pages, and product pages when they have tons and tons of textual content. Wanting to trim it up and make it look compact and neat! Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
In Wordpress getting marked as duplicate content for tags
Moz is marking 11 high priority items for duplicate content. Just switched to wordpress and publishing articles for the site but only have a few. The problem is on the tag pages. Since there aren't very many articles so when you go to the tag pages it lists one or two articles and hence there are pages with duplicate content. Most of the articles have the same tags / categories. Perhaps I'm using too many tags and categories? I'm using about 7 tags and around 2 categories for each post / event. I've read the solution is using canonical tags but a little confused on which page I should use for the tag and then I believe I need to point the duplicate pages to the correct page. For example, I have two events that are for dances and both have the same tags. So when you visit, site.com/tags/dance or site.com/events both pages have the same articles listed. Which page do I select as having the original content? Does it matter? Does that make sense? Someone was also saying I could use the Yoast plugin to fix, but not really seeing anything in the Yoast tools. I also see 301 redirects mentioned as a solution but the tag pages will be changing as we add new articles and they have a purpose so not really seeing that as a solution.
Web Design | | limited70 -
How to deal with 100s of Wordpress media link pages, containing images, but zero content
I have a Wordpress website with well over 1000 posts. I had a SEO audit done and it was highlighted that every post had clickable images. If you click the image a new webpage opens containing nothing but the image. I was told these image pages with zero content are very bad for SEO and that I should get them removed. I have contacted several Wordpress specialists on People Per Hour. I have basically been offered two solutions. 1 - redirect all these image pages to a 404, so they are not found by Google 2 - redirect each image page to the main post page the image is from. What's my best option here? Is there a better option? I don't care if these pages remain, providing they are not crawled by Google and classified as spam etc. All suggestions greatly received!
Web Design | | xpers0 -
Duplicate Content Home Page http Status Code Query
Hi All, We have just redone a site wide url migration (from old url structure to new url structure) and set up our 301's etc but have this one issue whereby I don't know if' it's a problem of not. We have 1 url - www.Domain.co.uk**/** which has been set up to 301 redirect back to www.domain.co.uk However, when I check the server response code, it comes back as 200. So although it appears to visually 301 redirect if I put the url in the tool bar, the status code says different. Could this be seen as a potential duplicate home page potentially and if so , any idea how I could get around it if we can't solve the root cause of it. This is on a cake php framework, thanks PEte
Web Design | | PeteC120 -
How to setup a redirect from one subfolder to another to avoid duplicate content.
Hello All, I have a WordPress site that Moz says has duplicate content. http://deltaforcepi.com/latest-news/page/3
Web Design | | Michael_Rock
http://deltaforcepi.com/category/latest-news/page/3 So I set up an addition to the .htaccess file . . . redirect code to move from one folder to another RewriteRule ^category/latest-news/(.*)$ /latest-news/$1 [R=301,NC,L] What did I do wrong? I am not proficient in .htaccess files.0 -
Does having a Blog link in the top level navigation provide any better SEO value, or would having it in a footer or top navigation work just as good?
Trying to decide on whether placing a link to the blog in our top level navigation would have a better SEO value than just placing it in top or footer navigation. I have an ecommerce site.
Web Design | | RPD0 -
Duplicate content on mobile sites
Hi Guys We are launching a mobile webshop later this year and have decided to use a subdomain for this. (m.domainname.xx). The content will be more or less identical with the one on the standard desktop site (domainname.xx), but im struggeling to find out if this will create dipplicate content between the mobile and desktop site. Does anyone have a solid answer for this one?
Web Design | | AndersDK0 -
Are my duplicate meta titles and descriptions an issue ?
HelloMy website http://www.gardenbeet.com has been rebuilt using prestacart and there are 158 duplicate title and meta descriptions being reported by google.My developer advised the following Almost all the duplicates are due to the same page being accessible at the root and following the category heading. e.g; /75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html
Web Design | | GardenBeet
/patio-planters/75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html This is hard-wired into PrestaShop. Was the Canonical module (now disabled) responsible for the confusion by not including the category name? The Googlebot shouldn't be scanning the root versions now. I don't believe this to be a serious issue but I'd recommend a second opinion from someone more SEO savvy just to be sure.Opinions??0