Are the duplicate content and 302 redirects errors negatively affecting ranking in my client's OS Commerce site?
-
I am working on an OS Commerce site and struggling to get it to rank even for the domain name. Moz is showing a huge number of 302 redirects and duplicate content issues but the web developer claims they can not fix those because ‘that is how the software in which your website is created works’. Have you any experience of OS Commerce? Is it the 302 redirects and duplicate content errors negatively affecting the ranking?
-
Hi Chris,
There are 1259 temporary (302) redirects (the web designer has a problem changing them to 301 redirects and so has left the site like that). These redirects all point to the same page - the log-in page - (as one can not write reviews on products unless logged in). I am concerned that this may look like spam behavior and may be negatively affecting ranking.
I feel it is up to the web designer to complete the site (and remove the 302s) however the web designer considers their job complete. I am trying to decide weather to take on the challenge and try to sort out the site in osCommerce (of which I have no experience) or weather it is better to start a WordPress blog on a fresh domain to attract traffic until the site owner is ready to rewrite the site in a more SEO friendly format. Currently the site is indexed but will not rank for even the company name.
Thanks so much for you help.
Alison
-
I would need to know more about the nature of the redirects to be able to say whether they would cause you any problems. If they are chained, you will run into issues mentioned by Matt Cutts in this video. Google has many signals to tell which sites are considered spam, and if you use the canonical references and have good quality content, I can't imagine redirects causing any red flags for your site.
Regards,
Chris
-
Hi Chris,
That sounds great I had not seen that add on I will see if that helps. Do you think if I expend the time and effort to solve the duplicate content issues then the 301 redirects will not cause any problems or do you think they are causing Google to think the site is spammy?
Alison
-
Hi Alison,
I'm not too familiar with osCommerce but there appear to be plugins allowing for canonical tags (http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/6578) that you might want to recommend to the designer. Having the same product for different colors and sizes is a great use for the canonical tag, and my suggestion would be to designate the most popular color/size as the canonical version. As for the duplicate content issues, I'm afraid my inexperience with osCommerce prevents me from giving any additional insight into that aspect of your problem.
For the redirects, if the pages being 302 redirected do not have many links pointing to them, the 302 redirects shouldn't be a problem. You should focus on the canonical tags for now.
Regards,
Chris
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks so much for your response.
The web designer has a problem applying 301 redirects and canonicalisation in osCommerce and I have limited experience osComerce. I do not want to waste time & clients money working on SEO (link building etc) when the site will not even rank for the domain name or exact product searches. I think the problems are more fundamental and lie in the design/implementation of the site. Crawl results show pages crawled 2,732, 250 Duplicate pages (same product in different colors / sizes etc), 1259 Temporary redirects. Do you think the duplicate pages are the problem or will it be the 302 redirects? Or is it both? Should I add more quality content ie a blog to this domain in the hope of getting the rankings and traffic up or start the blog on a separate new domain away from these issues?
Any experience of SEO in osCommerce?
Alison
-
The duplicate content is an issue if there are many versions of the same page on the site. You may be able to mitigate some of the negative impact from this by designating one as the canonical version, but ideally you would want to 301 redirect the duplicate pages to the one that has built the highest pagerank.
As for the 302 redirects, I am under the impression that the redirects themselves will not hurt you, but any links to the pages that are being redirected will not pass link juice along to the redirect destination, whereas a 301 redirect would pass a large portion of that link juice (some still leaks even with a 301 redirect).
Hope that helps,
Chris Wilson
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
-
New theme adds ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to all URL's as part of cache. How does this affect SEO
New theme I am working in ads ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to every URL. Theme developer says its a server setting issue. GoDaddy support says its part of cache an becoming prevalent in new themes. How does this impact SEO?
Technical SEO | | DML-Tampa0 -
Site address change: new site isn't showing up in Google, old site is gone.
We just transitioned mccacompanies.com to confluentstrategies.com. The problem is that when I search for the old name, the old website doesn't come up anymore to redirect people to the new site. On the local card, Google has even taken off the website altogether. (I'm currently still trying to gain access to manage the business listing) When I search for confluent strategies, the website doesn't come up at all. But if I use the site: operator, it is in the index. Basically, my client has effectively disappeared off the face of the Google. (In doing other name changes, this has never happened to me before) What can I do?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
301 redirecting old content from one site to updated content on a different site
I have a client with two websites. Here are some details, sorry I can't be more specific! Their older site -- specific to one product -- has a very high DA and about 75K visits per month, 80% of which comes from search engines. Their newer site -- focused generally on the brand -- is their top priority. The content here is much better. The vast majority of visits are from referrals (mainly social channels and an email newsletter) and direct traffic. Search traffic is relatively low though. I really want to boost search traffic to site #2. And I'd like to piggy back off some of the search traffic from site #1. Here's my question: If a particular article on site #1 (that ranks very well) needs to be updated, what's the risk/reward of updating the content on site #2 instead and 301 redirecting the original post to the newer post on site #2? Part 2: There are dozens of posts on site #1 that can be improved and updated. Is there an extra risk (or diminishing returns) associated with doing this across many posts? Hope this makes sense. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | djreich0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, we need some help on resolving this duplicate content issue,. We have redirected both domains to this magento website. I guess now Google considered this as duplicate content. Our client wants both domain name to go to the same magento store. What is the safe way of letting Google know these are same company? Or this is not ideal to do this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Client's site dropped completely for all keywords, but not brand name - not manual penalty... help!
We just picked up a new search client a few weeks ago. They've been a customer (we're an automotive dealer website provider) since October of 2011. Their content was very generic (came from the previous provider), so we did a quick once-over as soon as he signed up. Beefed up his page content, made it more unique and relevant... tweaked title tags... wrote meta descriptions (he had none). In just over a week, he went from ranking on page 4 or 5 for his terms to ranking on page 2 or 3. My team was working on getting his social media set up, set up his blog, started competitor research... And then this last weekend, something happened and he dropped completely from the rankings... He still shows up if you do a site: search, or if you search his exact business name, but for everything else, he's nowhere to be found. His URL is www.ohioautowarehouse.com, business name is "Ohio Auto Warehouse" We filed a reconsideration request on Monday, and just got a reply today that there was no manual penalty. They suggested we check our content, but we know we didn't do anything spammy or blackhat. We hadn't even fully optimized his site yet - we were just finishing up his competitor research and were planning on a full site optimization next week... so we're at a complete loss as to what happened. Also, he's not ranking for any of the vehicles in his inventory. Our vehicle pages always rank on page 1 or 2, depending on how big the city is... you can always search "year make model city" and see our customers' sites (whether they're doing SEO or not). This guy's cars aren't showing up... so we know something is going on... Any help would be a lifesaver. We've been doing this for quite some time now, and we've never had a site get penalized. Since the reconsideration request didn't help, we're not sure what to do...
Technical SEO | | Greg_Gifford0 -
It's imposible to keep track of rankings?
Hello, here something interesting I'm Using Rank Tracker from SEOMOZ And from the link-assistant's Rank Tracker as Well... I need to track Google.com and Google.co.ve (venezuela) so I did... i got my keyword an here are my results. 1 Keyword A at google.com (united states) Rank Tracker SEOMOZ = pos 6 Rank Tracker OTHER = pos 6 Manual Query on google.com = 9 (I used the exact url seomoz tells me its using) 2 Keyword A at Google.co.ve Rank Tracker SEOMOZ = pos 8 Rank Tracker OTHER = pos 7 Manual query on google.co.ve = pos 8 So.... Why it's that?, so far I think that google.com for me down here (it actually says "Español") it's a different index? for latinamerica? only spanish pages? maybe it's because there's a couple of minutes between looking with one tool and the other... any help, would be great... Dan
Technical SEO | | daniel.alvarez0