E-Commerce Duplicate Content
-
Hello all
We have an e-commerce website with approximately 3,000 products. Many of the products are displayed in multiple categories which in turn generates a different URL!
Accross the entire site I have noticed that the product pages are always outranked by competitors who have lower page authority, domain authority, total links etc etc.
I am convinced this is down to duplicate content issues. I understand there is no direct penalty but how would this affect our rankings? Is page rank split between all the duplicates, which in turn lowers it's ranking potential?
I have looked for a way to identify duplicate content using Google analytics but i've been unsuccessful. If the duplicate content is the issue and page rank is divided am i best using canonical or 301 redirects?
Sorry if this is an obvious question but If i'm correct we could see a huge improvement in rankings accross the board. Wow!
Cheers
Todd
-
When Google finds more than one document (ie URL) with the same content, it has to define which of them is the representative document of the cluster. In doing this it looks at inbound link metrics, essentially, plus date of the page, pagerank and other factors. In this decision, it can be wrong, indexing a page that can hurt you indexation (consider this situation: it indexes as representative document page 2 of a listing page in descending order: new items in this category end to be at page 2 or later and are less likely to be discovered).
The canonical tag can be a good solution, even if it is a hint and not a rule to Google...
-
Great stuff thanks!...
-
SEOMOZ had an awesome whiteboard on this.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation
Some more additional resources:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dealing-with-faceted-navigation-a-case-study
Matt Cutts on faceted navigation:
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml
Hope they help you
-
Thanks again! Unfortunately our system was built in house from scratch with no consideration for duplicate content
To be honest the product pages that I'm worried about have very few or no inbound links so maybe this isn't such a huge issue.
I have picked up on the fact almost all our pages including the homepage work on www and non www so maybe creating a 301 redirect for these will help also.
I will test the conical tag on a range of pages and mointor the results, hopefully our rankings will increase and I can look at some kind of strategy to roll this out.
Cheers for the help!
-
Google will select the most authortive aka whichever has the most links.
If you have a ton of inbound links I would recommend doing lots of research before inserting that tag. Find out which pages have the authority and don't throw it away.
This was a plague of eCommerce for years. Luckly most of the newest moden platfroms have caught up.
-
The duplicate item pages will not be indexed but visited the google bot. He will consider this page to be the one linked in the canonical tag.
I hope you won't have to set the urls manually !
-
Thanks for the quick response chaps! So if we have 9 duplicates for example will Google index all 9 pages or decide on 1 and never revisit the rest.
I couldn't see any duplicate URLs in the top content report.
We have over 3,000 products so it will be fun adding canonical tags to all the necessary pages
-
Toddy,
For every product of your site, you should identify its main category (the one that will be indexed). When seeing a product with a different category url, use the rel=canonical tag to give google the good url. This works well with e-commerce site.
You may also apply this logic between categories, as some listing between two categories are sometimes very similar.
For more information about the rel=canonical tag, see these resources :
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
-
The only "penalty" is the fact you could potentially spread your link juice across those multiple pages. Example:
You have 104 links to the same product, but they are equally pointed a 4 unique URLs. Now you technically have 26 links on whatever page Google 'selects' as your authority page.
Your competition has 100 links to the same product which only has 1 page.
With that type of setup your competition is always going to have that authority page ranked abouve you.
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
-
Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Duplicate content w/ same URLs
I am getting high priority issues for our privacy & terms pages that have the same URL. Why would this show up as duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RanvirGujral0 -
Affiliate Url & duplicate content
Hi i have checked passed Q&As and couldn't find anything on this so thought I would ask.
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram
I have recently noticed my URLS adding the following to the end: mydomain.com/?fullweb=1 I cant seem to locate where these URLS are coming from and how this is being created? This is causing duplicate content on google. I wanted to know ig anyone has had any previous experience with something like this? If anyone has any information on this it would be a great help. thanks E0 -
How does Google view duplicate photo content?
Now that we can search by image on Google and see every site that is using the same photo, I assume that Google is going to use this as a signal for ranking as well. Is that already happening? I ask because I have sold many photos over the years with first-use only rights, where I retain the copyright. So I have photos on my site that I own the copyright for that are on other sites (and were there first). I am not sure if I should make an effort to remove these photos from my site or if I can wait another couple years.
Technical SEO | | Lina5000 -
Creating unique SEO content for E-Commerce - worried about it being copied
Hi, So, we know we don't have the best content - so we are hiring writers to create unique content for each product. What happens if this is now copied by another website? What does Google see? Do they recognize us as the original content? Has anyone used DMCA.com ? is it worth it? thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | bjs20100 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles
A few weeks ago my error count went up for Duplicate Page Content and Titles. 4 errors in all. A week later the errors were gone... But now they are back. I made changes to the Webconfig over a month ago but nothing since. SEOmoz is telling me the duplicate content is this http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ and http://www.antiquebanknotes.com Thanks for any advise! This is the relevant web.config. <rewrite><rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.antiquebanknotes.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
<action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" www.antiquebanknotes.com="" {r:1"="">http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/{R:1}" />
</action></match></rule>
<rule name="Default Page" enabled="true" stopprocessing="true"><match url="^default.aspx$"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll"><add input="{REQUEST_METHOD}" pattern="GET"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="/"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite>0 -
Duplicate Content
Many of the pages on my site are similar in structure/content but not exactly the same. What amount of content should be unique for Google to not consider it duplicate? If it is something like 50% unique would it be preferable to choose one page as the canonical instead of keeping them both as separate pages?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Magento and Duplicate content
I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento, http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756 As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it? Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering? Thanks
Technical SEO | | gregster10001