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
-
Gregster,
I assume that you have found an answer to your question by now. However, I wanted to offer up what looks to be an extremely in depth and comprehensive walkthrough on Magento SEO from yoast.com. They have several sections on duplicate content, as well as a canonical plugin you may find useful.
http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/
Best of Luck!
-
"I recommend you nofollow the login, search, and cart pages through XML layout. That will cross off another 500 pages or so." Not nofollow. Don't use nofollow . This is for untrusted links - so should not be used for internal links.
It's Noindex. And then use the canonical tag if 301 Redirects are not an option. To make life more complicated, you need to be careful not to do use noindex and canonical tag simultaneously.
-
Hi Kevin,
I would be interested to talk more with you about this issue. What does your custom extension do that others don't?
Thanks again.
-
Hi Gregster. I feel your pain. Having worked on Magento for the past three years, I've come across a lot of "issues" you'd expect a top-tier e-commerce solution provider to have under control.
I've written about getting canonical URLs in CMS pages here, something that many Magento SEO extensions don't do. I also had a custom SEO extension created and would be happy to share with you. No cost. Just use it.
I don't know if you have multiple languages, but that alone will create an exponential amount of duplicate content from dynamic parameters. Go into your WMT and set those parameters to be ignored. If you aren't sure how to do that, it's well documented here and on Google, Yahoo, and Bing webmaster sites.
I recommend you nofollow the login, search, and cart pages through XML layout. That will cross off another 500 pages or so.
One last mention is that RocketTheme has created a pretty neat extension that will get rid of the p parameter altogether by using JS to switch from grid and list views. Or you could just select in your admin to only allow either grid or list instead of both.
Any more questions just ask.
-
Hi,
Magento is surely a "beast"... the way to solve your problem, as far as I understood it, is to use the rel="canonical", in order to show to the Search Engines what URL they have to consider in case of duplicated content.
The solutions?
- or you have very good devs skills (or a developer very fond of Magento);
- or you have to rely to the many extensions existing.
Very well know is the Yoast extension, but it seems it can give serious problem on the lastest version of Magento.
Another SEO extension is SEO Suite Pro Magento Extension (which exists also in a Ultimate version), Very good extension, but not for free.
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
-
Crawl Diagnostics: Duplicate Content Issues
The Moz crawl diagnostic is showing that I have some duplicate content issues on my site. For the most part, these are variations of the same product that are listed individually (i.e size/color). What would be the best way to deal with this? Choose one variation of the product and add a canonical tag? Thanks
Technical SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
URL Mixed Cases and Duplicate Content
Hi There, I have a question for you. I am working on a website where by typing any letter of the URL in lower or upper case, it will give a 200 code. Examples www.examples.com/page1/product www.examples.com/paGe1/Product www.examples.com/PagE1/prOdUcT www.examples.com/pAge1/proODUCt and so on… Although I cannot find evidence of backlinks pointing to my page with mixed cases, shall I redirect or rel=canonical all the possible combination of the cases to a lower version of them in order to prevent duplicate content? And if so, do you have any advice on how to complete such a massive job? Thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Midleton0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
Self inflicted duplicate content penalty?
Wondering if I could pick the brains of fellow mozer's. Been working with a client for about 3 months now to get their site up in the engine. In the three months the DA has gone from about 11 to 34 and PA is 40 (up from about 15) so that's all good. However, we seem not to be moving up the ranking much. The average DA of competitors in the niche in the top ten is 25. We have 9.2 times the average no of backlinks too. During a call to the client today they told me that they noticed a major drop in their rankings a few months back. Didn't say this when we started the project. I just searched for the first paragraph on their homepage and it returns 16,000 hits in google, The second returns 9600 and the third 1,400. Searching for the first paragraph of their 'about us' page gives me 13,000 results!! Clearly something is not right here. Looking into this, I seems that someone has use their content, word for word, as the descriptions on thousands of blogs, social sites. I am thinking that this, tied in with the slow movement in the listings, has caused a duplicate content penalty in the search engines. The client haven't copied anyone's content as it is very specific for their site but it seems all over the web. I have advised them to change their site content asap and hope we get a Panda refresh in to view the new unique content. Once the penalty is off i expect the site to shoot up the rankings. From an seo company point of view, should I have seen this before? Maybe. If they had said they suffered a major drop in rankings a few months back - when they dropped their seo agency, I would have looked into it, but one doesn't naturally assume that a client's copy will be posted all over the web, it is not something I would have searched for without reason to search Any thoughts on this, either saying yes or no to my theory would be most welcome please. Thanks Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Need help with Joomla duplicate content issues
One of my campaigns is for a Joomla site (http://genesisstudios.com) and when my full crawl was done and I review the report, I have significant duplicate content issues. They seem to come from the automatic creation of /rss pages. For example: http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose is the page but the duplicate content shows up as http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose/rss It appears that Joomla creates feeds for every page automatically and I'm not sure how to address the problem they create. I have been chasing down duplicate content issues for some time and thought they were gone, but now I have about 40 more instances of this type. It also appears that even though there is a canonicalization plugin present and enabled, the crawl report shows 'false' for and rel= canonicalization tags Anyone got any ideas? Thanks so much... Scott | |
Technical SEO | | sdennison0 -
Help removing duplicate content from the index?
Last week, after a significant drop in traffic, I noticed a subdomain in the index with duplicate content. The main site and subdomain can be found below. http://mobile17.com http://232315.mobile17.com/ I've 301'd everything on the subdomain to the appropriate location on the main site. Problem is, site: searches show me that if the subdomain content is being deindexed, it's happening really slowly. Traffic is still down about 50% in the last week or so... what's the best way to tackle this issue moving forward?
Technical SEO | | ccorlando0 -
Duplicate content handling.
Hi all, I have a site that has a great deal of duplicate content because my clients list the same content on a few of my competitors sites. You can see an example of the page here: http://tinyurl.com/62wghs5 As you can see the search results are on the right. A majority of these results will also appear on my competitors sites. My homepage does not seem to want to pass link juice to these pages. Is it because of the high level of Dup Content or is it because of the large amount of links on the page? Would it be better to hide the content from the results in a nofollowed iframe to reduce duplicate contents visibilty while at the same time increasing unique content with articles, guides etc? or can the two exist together on a page and still allow link juice to be passed to the site. My PR is 3 but I can't seem to get any of my internal pages(except a couple of pages that appear in my navigation menu) to budge of the PR0 mark even if they are only one click from the homepage.
Technical SEO | | Mulith0 -
Why are my pages getting duplicate content errors?
Studying the Duplicate Page Content report reveals that all (or many) of my pages are getting flagged as having duplicate content because the crawler thinks there are two versions of the same page: http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/audio.aspx http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/Audio.aspx The only difference is the capitalization. We don't have two versions of the page so I don't understand what I'm missing or how to correct this. Anyone have any thoughts for what to look for?
Technical SEO | | jkenyon0