Duplicate Content Due to Pagination
-
Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss. While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful...
Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages.
I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform.
Thank you for taking the time to read my question!
-
Will do, thanks Matt. We have quite a bit in this new design, so we are staying with the platform. BC is great as far as uptime, etc. We actually left Volusion after 6 years to move here.
-
Did you invest much into the new design? If so, it might be too late to consider moving platforms. Service levels like that belong in the 1900's!!!
I'd recommend giving Madwire Media a shout if they developed it for you. They MIGHT be able to help. Feel free to pop them my email address if they get lost, I could be of some help possibly.
-
Thank you Matt!
They (BC) are not a ton of help and there seems to be multiple issues. The last two techs, no joke, have said "listen, if I were an SEO expert I wouldn't be sitting here"... what kind of service is that?
I am going to talk to the developer that built the site (Madwire Media) and see what they can do, if anything.
-
Ah, sounds like that could be an issue. Unfortunately I'm not too familiar with Big Commerce. I have used it a couple of times but not in detail. I tend to use Magento or OSCommerce for large eCommerce projects and sometimes Wordpress (using something like WooCommerce) for smaller projects.
It's definitely worth shouting up to Big Commerce though to see if they can help.
-
This article makes complete sense Matt. I don't have the ability, that I'm aware of, to edit the canonical tags used by Big Commerce. They automatically generate those for all products and categories. Funny as it seems, they do NOT have the canonical tag in the home page which is a separate can of worms I am dealing with.
-
I will read all of those articles. I do know, based on some other issues we're having, that the things I may have access to edit in BigCommerce are limited. Hopefully these articles have some information I can use.
-
Here are some great articles offering several different solutions to your problem -
http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience
-
This should help you out Josh:
You need to set up pagination correctly.
Alternatively, altering how many products are on the page might help but don't do this if you think it might effect your customers experience (although unlikely).
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
-
Purchasing duplicate content
Morning all, I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well. I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | BackPack851 -
Duplicate Content on a Page Due to Responsive Version
What are the implications if a web designer codes the content of the site twice into the page in order to make the site responsive? I can't add the url I'm afraid but the H1 and the content appear twice in the code in order to produce both a responsive version and a desktop version. This is a Wordpress site. Is Google clever enough to distinguish between the 2 versions and treat them individually? Or will Google really think that the content has been repeated on the same page?
Technical SEO | | Wagada0 -
Duplicate content. Wordpress and Website
Hi All, Will Google punish me for having duplicate blog posts on my website's blog and wordpress? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Mike.NW0 -
Duplicate page content & titles on the same domain
Hey, My website: http://www.electromarket.co.uk is running Magento Enterprise. The issue I'm running into is that the URLs can be shortened and modified to display different things on the website itself. Here's a few examples. Product Page URL: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/studio-bedroom-monitors/bba0051 OR I could remove everything in the URL and just have: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 and the link will work just as well. Now my problem is, these two URL's load the same page title, same content, same everything, because essentially they are the very same web page. But how do I tell Google that? Do I need to tell Google that? And would I benefit by using a redirect for the shorter URLs? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tomhall900 -
How to protect against duplicate content?
I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google. My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored. Is that the right move? Are there other things I should do? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Duplicate Content in Wordpress.com
Hi Mozers! I have a client with a blog on wordpress.com. http://newsfromtshirts.wordpress.com/ It just had a ranking drop because of a new Panda Update, and I know it's a Dupe Content problem. There are 3900 duplicate pages, basically because there is no use of noindex or canonical tag, so archives, categories pages are totally indexed by Google. If I could install my usual SEO plugin, that would be a piece of cake, but since Wordpress.com is a closed environment I can't. How can I put a noindex into all category, archive and author peges in wordpress.com? I think this could be done by writing a nice robot.txt, but I am not sure about the syntax I shoud use to achieve that. Thank you very much, DoMiSol Rossini
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
How to prevent duplicate content in archives?
My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Getting rid of duplicate content with rel=canonical
This may sound like a stupid question, however it's important that I get this 100% straight. A new client has nearly 6k duplicate page titles / descriptions. To cut a long story short, this is mostly the same page (or rather a set of pages), however every time Google visits these pages they get a different URL. Hence the astronomical number of duplicate page titles and descriptions. Now the easiest way to fix this looks like canonical linking. However, I want to be absolutely 100% sure that Google will then recognise that there is no duplicate content on the site. Ideally I'd like to 301 but the developers say this isn't possible, so I'm really hoping the canonical will do the job. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0