Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
-
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing).
I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
-
Hi Jenni1,
You are right to be concerned. Do not use the canonical tag like you have described above.
I would recommend putting that content on it's own unique page. Then, pull in the content to your product pages via a an ajax request to pull that content into the tabbed area. This would make the content visible for the user but not a part of the page html for the search engines.
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
-
Review site using canonical tag in a puzzling way.
Have just been looking at a review site and they're using the canonical tag very strangely, to me. For example, they may have several pages of reviews of the same item - they use the canonical tag on page 2/3/4 to point back at page 1 - and yet there is no duplication between the pages. Any idea why they might be doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Tools to scan entire site for duplicate content?
HI guys, Just wondering if anyone knows of any tools to scan a site for duplicate content (with other sites on the web). Looking to quickly identify product pages containing duplicate content/duplicate product descriptions for E-commerce based websites. I know copy scape can which can check up to 10,000 pages in a single operation with Batch Search. But just wondering if there is anything else on the market i should consider looking at? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Cross Domain duplicate content...
Does anyone have any experience with this situation? We have 2 ecommerce websites that carry 90% of the same products, with mostly duplicate product descriptions across domains. We will be running some tests shortly. Question 1: If we deindex a group of product pages on Site A, should we see an increase in ranking for the same products on Site B? I know nothing is certain, just curious to hear your input. The same 2 domains have different niche authorities. One is healthcare products, the other is general merchandise. We've seen this because different products rank higher on 1 domain or the other. Both sites have the same Moz Domain Authority (42, go figure). We are strongly considering cross domain canonicals. Question 2 Does niche authority transfer with a cross domain canonical? In other words, for a particular product, will it rank the same on both domains regardless of which direction we canonical? Ex: Site A: Healthcare Products, Site B: General Merchandise. I have a health product that ranks #15 on site A, and #30 on site B. If I use rel=canonical for this product on site B pointing at the same product on Site A, will the ranking be the same if I use Rel=canonical from Site A to Site B? Again, best guess is fine. Question 3: These domains have similar category page structures, URLs, etc, but feature different products for a particular category. Since the pages are different, will cross domain canonicals be honored by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC1 -
Duplicate Page Content - Shopify
Moz reports that there are 1,600+ pages on my site (Sportiqe.com) that qualify as Duplicate Page Content. The website sells licensed apparel, causing shirts to go into multiple categories (ie - LA Lakers shirts would be categorized in three areas: Men's Shirts, LA Lakers Shirts and NBA Shirts)It looks like "tags" are the primary cause behind the duplicate content issues: // Collection Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts (Preferred URL): http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag): http://sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag, w/o the www.): http://sportiqe.com/collections/all-products/clippers (Different collection, w/ tag and same content)// Blog Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/7902801-dispatch-is-back: http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/tagged/elias-fundWould it make sense to do 301 redirects for the collection tags and use the Parameter Tool in Webmaster Tools to exclude blog post tags from their crawl? Or, is there a possible solution with the rel=cannonical tag?Appreciate any insight from fellow Shopify users and the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | farmiloe0 -
Canonical tags and product descriptions
I just wanted to check what you guys thought of this strategy for duplicate product descriptions. A sample product is a letter bracelet - a, b, c etc so there are 26 products with identical descriptions. It is going to be extremely difficult to come up with 25 new unique descriptions so with recommendation i'm looking to use the canonical tag. I can't set any to no-index because visitors will look for explicit letters. Because the titles only differ by the letter then a search for either letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet will just return results for 'letter bracelet' due to stop words unless the searcher explicitly searches for 'letter "a" bracelet. So I reckon I can make 4 new unique descriptions. I research what are the most popular letters picking 5 from the top (excluding 'a' and 'i'). Equally share the remaining letters between those 5 and with each group set a canonical tag pointing to the primary letter of that group. Does this seem a sensible thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Does rel=canonical fix duplicate page titles?
I implemented rel=canonical on our pages which helped a lot, but my latest Moz crawl is still showing lots of duplicate page titles (2,000+). There are other ways to get to this page (depending on what feature you clicked, it will have a different URL) but will have the same page title. Does having rel=canonical in place fix the duplicate page title problem, or do I need to change something else? I was under the impression that the canonical tag would address this by telling the crawler which URL was the URL and the crawler would only use that one for the page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | askotzko0 -
Diagnosing duplicate content issues
We recently made some updates to our site, one of which involved launching a bunch of new pages. Shortly afterwards we saw a significant drop in organic traffic. Some of the new pages list similar content as previously existed on our site, but in different orders. So our question is, what's the best way to diagnose whether this was the cause of our ranking drop? My current thought is to block the new directories via robots.txt for a couple days and see if traffic improves. Is this a good approach? Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0 -
I'm not sure why SEOMoz is reporting duplicate content
I have thousands of duplicate page content errors on my site, but I'm not exactly sure why. For example, the crawl is reporting this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-glee-costumes.html is a duplicate of this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-jersey-shore-costumes.html . All of these products are unique to the page - what is causing it to flag as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FutureMemoriesInc0