Duplicate Page Content - Shopify
-
Moz reports that there are 1,600+ pages on my site (Sportiqe.com) that qualify as Duplicate Page Content. The website sells licensed apparel, causing shirts to go into multiple categories (ie - LA Lakers shirts would be categorized in three areas: Men's Shirts, LA Lakers Shirts and NBA Shirts)It looks like "tags" are the primary cause behind the duplicate content issues: // Collection Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts (Preferred URL): http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag): http://sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag, w/o the www.): http://sportiqe.com/collections/all-products/clippers (Different collection, w/ tag and same content)// Blog Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/7902801-dispatch-is-back: http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/tagged/elias-fundWould it make sense to do 301 redirects for the collection tags and use the Parameter Tool in Webmaster Tools to exclude blog post tags from their crawl? Or, is there a possible solution with the rel=cannonical tag?Appreciate any insight from fellow Shopify users and the Moz community.
-
Hello Chris,
I saw that Brett added rel="canonical" to his product template in shopify but wouldn't that tell Google not to look at all the products now? (ignore them) What if you want the images and the content of your product pages indexed by Google and showing up in results?
Thank you!
-
Hi,
As I mentioned I'm still playing with it.
But as far as I can see, BigCommerce has a better solution (or at least handle the URLs better).Without getting into my store, I also have on my site many "collections" - special offers, recommended, etc etc.
The link to the product page is always the same link. It doesn't make sense to link to "store.com/special-offers/product" and then canonical it to "store.com/product"
Which is what Shopify does... After discussing with them on those matters the answers were that everything can be changed but it might be complicated.
-
Thanks again for your help Chris!
-
according to these, they will always show as duplicate in the report (but won't count against you in your search engine results).
-
Thanks Chris! I'm hoping that the issue falls under the Fixing Crawl Diagnostic Issues, in which case it sounds like there is no issue. But the Rogerbot answer confuses me, because Roger shouldn't count the canonical version of the page as duplicate content (which is the case)?
-
From the issue you described, the rel=canonical is still the right choice.
According to Moz Documentation on Fixing Crawl DIagnostic Issues: "Keep in mind that that canonicals will stop the pages from ranking against each other, but they will still show up as duplicate content from a UI perspective, so we will still count them as duplicate."
Also from Moz documentation on How does Rogerbot calculate duplicate content?: "Two documents are considered duplicates if they have a 95% overlap. Furthermore, we should not count duplicates across pages that specify one or the other as the canonical version. The canonical version should not recognize the other as a duplicate, and the other version should not recognize the canonical as a duplicate."
-
Chris, taking your advice I added this code into my Shopify theme:
{% if template == 'product' %}{% if collection %}
{% endif %}{% endif %}
This code was added July 9th, exactly two weeks ago and I haven't seen the Duplicate Content issue decrease at all according to the Moz Campaign tools. Does it typically take this long to see an impact?
Should I reconsider doing 301 redirects for all my t-shirt collections? Thanks for your advice. (If useful, I also found this article discussing duplicate content on Shopify with a rel=canonical solution.)
-
What's your store URL, and how would you suggest we categorize our shirts?
It's typical for apparel companies to have a shirt that fits into a gender category, as well as a collection category.
-
Hi Brett,
I'm new to Shopify and still playing with it. While I agree with Chris here, I believe that you may have organized your products / product collections badly on Shopify. Ideally, the links will always take you to the same location. Having the same product on many different URLs (even with canonical) is not a good solution.
http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/sportiqe-apparel/products/new-york-shirt-metro-collection
http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/mens-shirts/products/new-york-shirt-metro-collection -
Brett, this looks like the perfect application for rel=canonical--and in your description of the item be sure to use vocabulary that deals with all three of the categories.
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 H1 on single page for mobile and desktop
I have a responsive site and whilst this works and is liked by google from a user perspective the pages could look better on mobile. I have a wordpress site and use the Divi Builder with elegant themes and have developed a separate page header for mobile that uses a manipulated background image and smaller H1 font size. When crawling the site two H1s can be detected on the same page - they are exactly the same words and only one will show according to device. However, I need to know if this will cause me a problem with google and SEO. As the mobile changes are not just font size but also adaptations to some visual elements it is not something I can simply alter in the CSS. Would appreciate some input as to whether this is a problem or not
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cells4Life0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Parameter Strings & Duplicate Page Content
I'm managing a site that has thousands of pages due to all of the dynamic parameter strings that are being generated. It's a real estate listing site that allows people to create a listing, and is generating lots of new listings everyday. The Moz crawl report is continually flagging A LOT (25k+) of the site pages for duplicate content due to all of these parameter string URLs. Example: sitename.com/listings & sitename.com/listings/?addr=street name Do I really need to do anything about those pages? I have researched the topic quite a bit, but can't seem to find anything too concrete as to what the best course of action is. My original thinking was to add the rel=canonical tag to each of the main URLs that have parameters attached. I have also read that you can bypass that by telling Google what parameters to ignore in Webmaster tools. We want these listings to show up in search results, though, so I don't know if either of these options is ideal, since each would cause the listing pages (pages with parameter strings) to stop being indexed, right? Which is why I'm wondering if doing nothing at all will hurt the site? I should also mention that I originally recommend the rel=canonical option to the web developer, who has pushed back in saying that "search engines ignore parameter strings." Naturally, he doesn't want the extra work load of setting up the canonical tags, which I can understand, but I want to make sure I'm both giving him the most feasible option for implementation as well as the best option to fix the issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
How to avoid content canibalizm? How do I control which page is the landing page?
Hi All, To clarify my question I will give an example. Let's assume that I have a laptop e-commerce site and that one of my main categories is Samsung Laptops. The category page shows lots of laptops and a small section of text. On the other hand, in my article section I have a HUGE article about Samsung Laptops. If we consider the two word phrases each page is targeting then the answer is the same - Samsung Laptops. On the article i point to the category page using anchor such as "buy samsung laptops" or "samsung laptops" and on the category page (my wishful landing page) I point to the article with "learn about samsung laptops" or "samsung laptops pros and cons". Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
How can you indexed pages or content on pages that are behind a pay wall or subscription login.
I have a client that has a boat of awesome content they provide to their client that's behind a pay wall ( ie: paid subscribers can only access ) Any suggestions mozzers? How do I get those pages index? Without completely giving away the contents in the front end.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BizDetox0 -
Advice needed on how to handle alleged duplicate content and titles
Hi I wonder if anyone can advise on something that's got me scratching my head. The following are examples of urls which are deemed to have duplicate content and title tags. This causes around 8000 errors, which (for the most part) are valid urls because they provide different views on market data. e.g. #1 is the summary, while #2 is 'Holdings and Sector weightings'. #3 is odd because it's crawling the anchored link. I didn't think hashes were crawled? I'd like some advice on how best to handle these, because, really they're just queries against a master url and I'd like to remove the noise around duplicate errors so that I can focus on some other true duplicate url issues we have. Here's some example urls on the same page which are deemed as duplicates. 1) http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Holdings-and-sectors-weighting?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE&widgets=1 What's the best way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchPM0 -
Does rel=canonical fix duplicate page titles?
I implemented rel=canonical on our pages which helped a lot, but my latest Moz crawl is still showing lots of duplicate page titles (2,000+). There are other ways to get to this page (depending on what feature you clicked, it will have a different URL) but will have the same page title. Does having rel=canonical in place fix the duplicate page title problem, or do I need to change something else? I was under the impression that the canonical tag would address this by telling the crawler which URL was the URL and the crawler would only use that one for the page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | askotzko0 -
I need to add duplicate content, how to do this without penalty
On a site I am working on we provide a landing page summary (say top 10 information snippets) and provide a link 'see more' to take viewers to a page with all the snippets. Now those first 10 snippets will be repeated in the full list. Is this going to be a duplicate content problem? If so, any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oznappies0