Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SEO for Online Auto Parts Store
-
I'm currently doing an audit for an online auto parts store and am having a hard time wrapping my head around their duplicate content issue. The current set up is this:
- The catalogue starts with the user selecting their year of vehicle
- They then choose their brand (so each of the year pages have listed every single brand of car, creating duplicate content)
- They then choose their model of car and then the engine
- And then this takes them to a page listing every type/category of product they sell (so each and every model type/engine size has the exact same content!) This is amounting to literally thousands of pages being seen as duplicates
It's a giant mess. Is using rel=canonical the best thing to do? I'm having a hard time seeing a logical way of structuring the site to avoid this issue.
Anyone have any ideas?
-
First, is this content dynamic? Depending on how the user progresses through these choices a search engine may not even see this information.
Second, as long as those aren't the pages you are trying to rank I can't see them actually having that big of an impact (if any) on your overall SEO. There is a difference between having pages that have the same content, and having pages that are duplicate content.
Rel canonical would be another way to save your skin, and making sure that the choices themselves are no-follow links (as long as there is some other method to get to the deeper pages).
Personally for the sake of SEO and user experience (which is far more important) I'd talk to the company about creating a dynamic selection wizard that could be a popup and once the user makes all their choices brings them to the right HTML page.
The HTML pages would be open, crawl-able, structured and sitemapped and the wizard would by a dynamic widget loaded in from a page that was robots disallowed. Helping both the human and spider experience - just my two cents!
Best of luck!
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
-
Is NitroPack plugin Black Hat SEO for speed optimization
We are getting ready to launch our redesigned WP site and were considering using NitroPack performance optimization plugin, until some of our developers started ringing the alarm. Here is what some in the SEO community are saying about the tool. The rendering of the website made with the NitroPack plugin in the Page Metric Test Tools is based entirely on the inline CSS and JS in the HTML file without taking into account additional numerous CSS or JS files loaded on the page. As a result, the final metric score does not include CSS and JavaScript files evaluation and parsing. So what they are saying is that a lot of websites with the NitroPack plugin never become interactive in the Page Metric Tools because all interactivity is derived from JavaScript and CSS execution. So, their "Time to Interactive" and "Speed Index" should be reported as equal to infinity. Would Google consider this Black Hat SEO and start serving manual actions to sites using NitroPack? We are not ready to lose our hard-earned Google ranking. Please, let me know your thoughts on the plugin. Is it simply JS and CSS "lazy loading" that magically offers the first real-world implementation that works magic and yields fantastic results, or is it truly a Black Hat attempt at cheating Google PageSpeed Insights numbers? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | opiates0 -
Is using a H1 tag in a logo image bad for SEO?
We have brand logos on certain pages that have H1 tags in them - the H1 text being the brand's name, as this is what we'd want the title of the page to be. The logos are at the top of the page instead of a written title. But is this the best option for SEO? Do search engines value H1 tags in images as highly as a standard H1 tag?Would it be better for SEO to add an alt tag to the logo and add a separate H1 tag on the page that's also the name of the brand?
On-Page Optimization | | DVLighting0 -
Affect of ™ and ® in title for SEO
I am looking at adding the trademark and rights reserved symbols to some of my titles. I think this might help with click through rate. From what I have found, this shouldn't have an affect on SEO unless it makes the title too long. Is this correct? Stephen
On-Page Optimization | | stephen.volker1 -
Thoughts on adding "near me" to title tag for local SEO?
I want to lean out my title tags and will most likely be doing an A/B test. They currently have the "Near Me" modifier in there, which I believe Google can distinguish local SEO without it. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | imjonny1230 -
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO?
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO? We have some comments on each of our pages and its time taking to moderate them, so wanted to know if its beneficial in any ways for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | bsharath0 -
Less Tags better for SEO?
I am currently reviewing my strategy when it comes to categories and tags on my site. Having been no-indexed for some time, and having many tags with just one entry I am thinking that this is not optimal for SEO purposes. This is what I am planning: Categories - Change these to Index, but only after adding a hundred words or so by way of introduction (see this example - https://www.besthostnews.com/news/hosting/a-small-orange-news/). With the categories I am thinking of highlighting key articles as well to improve link juice distribution to older articles that are important. Tags - About half my tags have only 1 entry, with a few more just having 2 entries. I am thinking of deleting all tags with just one entry, and trying to merge those with just two or 3 entries where it makes sense to do so. I will keep these as no-index, but I think this will mean more optimal distribution of link juice within the site. I would appreciate your thoughts \ suggestions on the best practices here.
On-Page Optimization | | TheWebMastercom0 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
SEO value of "in the news" links on home page?
Notice more sites have an "in the News" section on the home page, or something similar like press releases... Apart from providing users fresh content, is there an SEO value to this? What is the explanation for this? Have a feeling the answer is obvious but just not too sure Thanks a lot.
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0
