Many Errors on E-commerce website mainly Duplicate Content - Advice needed please!

[AlphaDigital]

Hi Mozzers,

I would need some advice on how to tackle one of my client’s websites. We have just started doing SEO for them and after moz crawled the e-commerce it has detected:

36 329 Errors – 37496 warnings and 2589 Notices all going up!

Most of the errors are due to duplicate titles and page content but I cannot identify where the duplicate pages come from, these are the links moz detected of the Duplicate pages (unfortunately I cannot add the website for confidentiality reasons) :

• www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2

• www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&products_per_2&products_per_2&page=2

• www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00=&products_per_00&products_per_2&page=2

• www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_2=&products_per_00&page=2

• www.thewebsite.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.view&category_id=233&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&products_per_00&page=2

With these URLs it is quite hard to identify which pages need to be canonicalize. And this is jsut an example out of thousands on this website.

If anyone would have any advice on how to fix this and how to tackle 37496 errors on a website like this  that would be great.

Thank you for your time,

Lyam

[dotfly]

agree to that... rel="prev" & rel="next" will help

[IrvCo_Interactive]

Hi there,

This is just a wild guess, but it sounds like this is a pagination issue. There are many tactics for dealing with pagination issues from an SEO perspective. One that I have seen is when you get a series of results, all the pages in the series are canonicalized  back to the first page of the series. So /blah.results?param1=blue&page=2 would have a canonical tag for page 1. Page 3, 4, 5, etc. would all have canonical tags back to page one of the series. You should also include rel=prev and rel=next tags on the pages.

Or, you can look at how Moz.com deals with it in their blog. When they have a series of pages the pages after the first in the series are blocked from indexing using the robots tag: http://moz.com/blog/category/white-hat-black-hat?page=2 (view source on this page and look for robots tag)

Good luck!