Will duplicate content on ecommerce cause harm in search results?
-
First off, SEO learner, not a professional, therefore question is not for any client.
A new (less 1 yr) ecommerce site in a particular sector is now moving into partnership with relevant websites to be their online store. A 'store' link on the partner site will redirect to the ecommerce domain to a dedicated area (on a domain/directory path) with the partner's branding. To do this though means duplicating the entire catalogue for each partner that comes on board for this scheme.
So the original ecommercesite.com/categories also delivers
ecommercesite.com/partner1/categories (with partner's brand identity)
ecommercesite.com/partner2/categories (with partner's brand identity) and so on
Won't duplicating the product catalogue in directories cause problems in delivering effective SERPs for the original ecommerce site?
-
Thank you to both for replies. Gianluca that was exactly the answer I was looking for I guess which showed that I was on the right lines with my own thinking and learning but I also think I wasn't confident enough to assert that to someone developing an ecommerce site themselves from within their own limited resources.
But my initial spot of duplicate content on their site was right, their view is to fix it with robots.txt and no index tags so your excellent second link, Gianluca, and JoelHit's response has enabled me to give them to explain their situation and confidently recommend a solution appropriate to their needs.
Many thanks
-
Hi,
duplicate content per se is not cause of penalizations, but it penalizes the performance of your eCommerce in the rankings.
Infact:
- Search Engines would rank one of the duplicate pages and not the one you would like your site would rank for (domain.com/categories)
- People could link to a duplicate page and not the the main one, so wasting link juice
- All the duplicated pages consume you crawl budget, therefore you could have your site indexed for duplicates but not for more important pages.
I suggest you to read this "Learn SEO" article http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content and this post by Ben Jarriola that can give you solutions to this problem: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical
Hope this help you.
Ciao
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
-
Issue with duplicate content
Hello guys, i have a question about duplicate content. Recently I noticed that MOZ's system reports a lot of duplicate content on one of my sites. I'm a little confused what i should do with that because this content is created automatically. All the duplicate content comes from subdomain of my site where we actually share cool images with people. This subdomain is actually pointing to our Tumblr blog where people re-blog our posts and images a lot. I'm really confused how all this duplicate content is created and what i should do to prevent it. Please tell me whether i need to "noindex", "nofollow" that subdomain or you can suggest something better to resolve that issue. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Quickview popup duplicate content
Hi We have an eccomerce site. We just added to the product list view a quickview tab - when you roll mouse over it a popup window with the product image and short description shows up - is this a problem of duplicate content( its the same content that's on the product pages except there we also have a long detailed description) - t is done with javascript. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | henya0 -
Duplicate Content
Crawl Diagnostics has returned several issues that I'm unsure how to fix. I'm guessing it's a canonical link issue but not entirely sure... Duplicate Page Content/Titles On a website (http://www.smselectronics.co.uk/market-sectors) with 6 market sectors but each pull the same 3 pages as child pages - certifications, equipment & case studies. On each products section where the page only shows X amount of items but there are several pages to fit all the products this creates multiple pages. There is also a similar pagination problem with the Blogs (auto generated date titles & user created SEO titles) & News listings. Blog Tags also seem to generate duplicate pages with the same content/titles as the parent page. Are these particularly important for SEO or is it more important to remove the duplication by deleting them? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | BBDCreative0 -
Instance IDs on "Events" in wordpress causing duplicate content
Hi all I use Yoast SEO on wordpress which does a pretty good job of insertint rel=canonical in to the header of the pages where approproate, including on my event pages. However my crawl diagnostics have highlighted these event pages as duplicate content and titles because of the instance id parameter being added to the URL. When I look at the pages head I see that rel=canonical is as it should be. Please see here for an example: http://solvencyiiwire.com/ai1ec_event/unintended-consequences-basel-ii-and-solvency-ii?instance_id= My question is how come SEOMoz is highlighting these pages as duplicate content and what can I do to remedy this. Is it because ?instance_id= is part of the string on the canonical link? How do I remove this? My client uses the following plugins "All-in-One Event Calendar by Timely" and
Technical SEO | | wellsgp
Google Calendar Events Many thanks!0 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Duplicate Content on Product Pages
Hello I'm currently working on two sites and I had some general question's about duplicate content. For the first one each page is a different location, but the wording is identical on each; ie it says Instant Remote Support for Critical Issues, Same Day Onsite Support with a 3-4 hour response time, etc. Would I get penalized for this? Another question i have is, we offer Antivirus support for providers ie Norton, AVG,Bit Defender etc. I was wondering if we will get penalized for having the same first paragraph with only changing the name of the virus provider on each page? My last question is we provide services for multiple city's and towns in various states. Will I get penalized for having the same content on each page, such as towns and producuts and services we provide? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ilyaelbert0 -
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
Hi - We are due to launch a .com version of our site, with the ability to put prices into local currency, whereas our .co.uk site will be solely £. If the content on both the .com and .co.uk sites is the same (at product level mainly), will we be penalised? What is the best way to get around this?
Technical SEO | | swgolf1230