Is My Boilerplate Product Description Causing Duplicate Content Issues?
-
I have an e-commerce store with 20,000+ one-of-a-kind products. We only have one of each product, and once a product is sold we will never restock it. So I really have no intention to have these product pages showing up in SERPs. Each product has a boilerplate description that the product's unique attributes (style, color, size) are plugged into. But a few sentences of the description are exactly the same across all products.
Google Webmaster Tools doesn't report any duplicate content. My Moz Crawl Report show 29 of these products as having duplicate content. But a Google search using the site operator and some text from the boilerplate description turns up 16,400 product pages from my site.
Could this duplicate content be hurting my SERPs for other pages on the site that I am trying to rank? As I said, I'm not concerned about ranking for these products pages. Should I make them "rel=canonical" to their respective product categories? Or use "noindex, follow" on every product? Or should I not worry about it?
-
My SERPs for a competitive term I felt I underperforming for dropped about 10 spots overnight after I added "noindex,follow" to the product pages. From the 3rd page to the 4th page, so it's not like I had a lot to lose. My SERPs for less competitive long tail keywords, which is where I'm getting most of my traffic, have dropped slightly or stayed the same.
Should I cross my fingers and hope for a recovery? Revert the product pages back to "index, follow"? Any thoughts?
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks so much for the thorough response.
Based on several comparative metrics with sites that are outranking me significantly, I do feel the site is underperforming. Because our traffic is ridiculously seasonal the Panguin Tool doesn't provide any clues.
I just added to all my products using Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin. We'll see what happens.
Thanks,
Zach -
Hi Zachary
I really can't be sure if it's having an adverse affect, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Having looked at just 3 of the product pages, there is a problem with content being repeated, but I think it is being compounded by there being no other content on the page either to make it look unique.
Both are the hallmarks to a potential Panda penalty, which could affect the pages performance themselves and/or the whole domain. So, if you're seeing subpar performance (and even if you're performing well it's worth reading on) I would look at the following solution.
For every product that you do not intend to restock or reuse, I would either add a tag, add a 301 redirect or simply remove the page and serve a 404. If we're talking tens of thousands, then having that many redirects might bloat out your .htaccess file (making it larger and longer to load/process) and having an instant drop of 20k URLs and 404 errors might look a bit odd to Google as well. However, adding 20k tags is a bit of a nightmare as well.
You might want to try a combination of all 3 - a few 404 errors is nothing to worry about - but the logic is that you will be removing a number of pages that have this duplicate content on it, thus improving the quality of the domain. For your remaining 'live' pages, I'd highly recommend taking the time to add 200+ words of unique content about the product in order to avoid this happening again.
An alternative solution would be to block the bots from accessing the /shop/ subfolder in your robots.txt file - and then setting up the shop and the currently active product listings on a different subdomain. You'd lose the ability to use the /shop/ folder, but it would be quicker than manually adding tags or 301 redirects.
That's the method I would use if I wanted to address the issue. However, this **may not be necessary **if your site is not performing badly. You can check this to a degree with the Panguin Tool - this overlays your organic traffic in analytics with Google updates - if a drop in traffic coincides with a Panda penalty, you may be under the affect of one - in which case you should take action ASAP.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi Zachery
29 pages showing up in your Moz crawl report out of 16,400 indexed pages on your site is such a small percentage (0.18% to be accurate) it is not worth worrying about. Also, if GWT is not reporting any issues I think you should be fine.
Don't worry, be happy!
Peter
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
-
Selling same products under separate brands and can't consolidate sites...duplicate content issues?
I have a client selling home goods online and in-store under two different brand names in separate regions of the country. Currently, the websites are completely identical aside from branding. It is unlikely that they would have the capacity to write unique titles and page content for each website (~25,000 pages each), and the business would never consolidate the sites. Would it make sense to use canonical tags pointing to the higher-performing website on category and product pages? This way we could continue to capture branded search to the lesser brand while consolidating authority on the better performing website. What would you do?
Technical SEO | | jluke.fusion0 -
I have duplicate content but // are causing them
I have 3 pages duplicated just by a / Example: https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**//**
Technical SEO | | Renalynd
https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**/** What would cause this?? And how would I fix it? Thanks! Rena0 -
Duplicate content issue
Moz crawl diagnostic tool is giving me a heap of duplicate content for each event on my website... http://www.ticketarena.co.uk/events/Mint-Festival-7/ http://www.ticketarena.co.uk/events/Mint-Festival-7/index.html Should i use a 301 redirect on the second link? i was unaware that this was classed as duplicate content. I thought it was just the way the CMS system was set up? Can anyone shed any light on this please. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Modx revolution- getting around index.php vs. root duplicate content issue?
Basically, SEOMoz bots are flagging our index.php and root files as duplicate content of one another, therefore cutting the page authority of each. What we want to do is make the root the canonical preference over index.php. Ordinarily, we should be able to do this in the htaccess file. For some reason, as the site has been built into a cms using ModX Revolution, this does not seem to work. We've tried A TON of htaccess rewrite mods to resolve this issue to no avail. We have also tried revising our sitemap to include only the root address. Any ideas? We'll try most anything at this point. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | G2W0 -
Over 700+ duplicate content pages -- help!
I just signed up for SEO Moz pro for my site. The initial report came back with over 700+ duplicate content pages. My problem is that while I can see why some of the content is duplicated on some of the pages I have no idea why it's coming back as duplicated. Is there a tutorial for a novie on how to read the duplicate content report and what steps to take? It's an e-commerce website and there is some repetitive content on all the product pages like our "satisfaction guaranteed" text and the fabric material... and not much other text. There's not a unique product description because an image speaks for itself. Could this be causing the problem? I have lots of URLs with over 50+ duplicates. Thx for any help.
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Shopify duplicate content issue
We recently moved out site to shopify but now have a duplicate content issue as we have the same products in different collections. I have added canonical code to get rid of this but my webmaster tools still shows hundreds of duplicate pages. How can I tell if the code I added is working? How long will it take for google to recognise this and drop the duplicates from their index and is this likely to have a significant impact on SERPS? Our we page is www.devoted2vintage.co.uk. Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | devoted2vintage1 -
Duplicate Content on Navigation Structures
Hello SEOMoz Team, My organization is making a push to have a seamless navigation across all of its domains. Each of the domains publishes distinctly different content about various subjects. We want each of the domains to have its own separate identity as viewed by Google. It has been suggested internally that we keep the exact same navigation structure (40-50 links in the header) across the header of each of our 15 domains to ensure "unity" among all of the sites. Will this create a problem with duplicate content in the form of the menu structure, and will this cause Google to not consider the domains as being separate from each other? Thanks, Richard Robbins
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0