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
-
Pro's & contra's: http vs https
Hi there, We are planning to take the step and go from http to https. The main reason to do this, is to mean trustfull to our clients. And of course the rumours that it would be better for ranking (in the future). We have a large e-commerce site. A part of this site ia already HTTPS. I've read a lot of info about pro's and contra's, also this MOZ article: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl
Technical SEO | | Leonie-Kramer
But i want to know some experience from others who already done this. What did you encountered when changing to HTTPS, did you had ranking drops, or loss of links etc? I want to make a list form pro's and contra's and things we have to do in advance. Thanx, Leonie0 -
I have a 404 error on my site i can't find.
I have looked everywhere. I thought it might have just showed up while making some changes, so while in webmaster tools i said it was fixed.....It's still there. Even moz pro found it. error is http://mydomain.com/mydomain.com No idea how it even happened. thought it might be a plugin problem. Any ideas how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | NateStewart0 -
How to fix this 404 : Error ( 4XX (Client Error) )
In my report this indicates 404 : Error http://www.thexxxhouse.com/what_sets_us_aparat.html This web page removed from server .How to fix this in SEO friendly way .
Technical SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Duplicate Content for our Advertising Sites Showing in Search Results
Hello, My company has a couple different sites (Magento Stores) for Organic, Adwords and AdCenter purposes.They are mirror sites of each except for phone number, contact form, ect. Here is our organic site: http://www.oxygenconcnetratorstore.com/ Adwords and Adcenter site respectively: http://www.oxygenconcnetratorstore.com/portable/
Technical SEO | | chuck-layton
http://www.oxygenconcnetratorstore.com/oxygen/ The problem is, both the Adwords and AdCenter stores appear in Google SERP when you put in the exact URL. I have "noindex/nofollow" tag on both the advertising sites but they are still showing in search results. I feel we are getting hurt for basically have 3 sites of duplicate content. Is there a reason why the sites would be showing in search results even with the nofollow/index tags?? Any help would be awesome. Thanks. seomoz.jpg0 -
Website's stability and it's affect on SEO
What is the best way to combat previous website stability issues? We had page load time and site stability problems over the course of several months. As a result our keyword rankings plummeted. Now that the issues have been resolved, what's the best/quickest way to regain our rankings on specific keywords? Thanks, Eric
Technical SEO | | MediaCause0 -
Pages with different content and meta description marked as duplicate content
I am running into an issue where I have pages with completely different body and meta description but they are still being marked as having the same content (Duplicate Page Content error). What am I missing here? Examples: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/what-to-expect-in-the-summer-internship
Technical SEO | | WallStreetOasis.com
and
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/something-ventured http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/im-in-the-long-run
and
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/image/jhjpeg0 -
How do 301 redirects affect rankings?
Scenario: example.com/red-shoes gets 301 redirected to example.com/brown-boots because we have stopped selling red shoes and now only sell brown boots (which is a fairly new page with no authority). the red-shoes page ranked well for "red shoes" and "footwear". Will Google still index and show the red-shoes url in the SERPs? Will the "red shoes" and "footwear" keywords still rank well? Or does the redirected/new boots page need to properly support these keywords? The boots page has inherited the juice from the shoes page, but how does it help the boots page rank well? Only for keywords that both pages targeted, like a general "footwear" type keyword? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | akim260 -
Moving Duplicate Sites
Apologies in advance for the complexity. My client, company A, has purchased company B in the same industry, with A and B having separate domains. Current hosting arrangement combines registrar and hosting functions in 1 account so as to allow both domains to point to a common folder, with the result that identical content is displayed for both A & B. The current site is kind of an amalgam of A and B. Company A has decided to rebrand and completely absorb company B. The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A. The current (only) hosting package is Windows, and I am creating a new site and moving them to Linux with another hosting company. I can use 301's for A , but not for B as it is a separate domain and currently shares a hosting package with A. How can I best preserve the link juice that domain B has? The only conclusion I can come up with is to set up separate Linux hosting for B which will allow for the use of 301's. Does anyone have a better idea?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0