Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
-
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc...
This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about:
a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings.
b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page.
c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages.
d. ?
Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages.
Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
-
I see. I think the concern is with duplicate content though, right?
-
Either way, it will be tough to go that route and still get indexed. Its a pagination issue that everyone would like a solution to, but there just isnt one. It wont hurt you to do this, but wont ultimately get all those pages indexed like you want.
-
Disagree. I think you are missing out big time here- category pages are the bread and butter for eCommerce sites. Search engines have confirmed that these pages are of high value for users, and it gets you a chance to have optimized static content on a page that also shows product results. All the major e retailers heavily rely on these pages (Amazon, ebay, zappos, etc...)
-
Sorry, I don't think I clarified. The page title and meta descriptions would be unique, however they would be almost the same except for it saying "Page [x}" somewhere within it.
-
Option A doesnt do anything for you. I think the search engines flag duplicated title tags, even with different products on the page.
-
Thanks for the comprehensive response, Ryan; really great info here!
Would option A be out of the question in your mind due to the fact that the page attributes would be too similar even though unique content is on all the subsequent category pages? I know this method isn't typical, however, it would be the most efficient way to address.
Note: A big downside to this is also the fact that we will have multiple pages targeting the same keyword, however, since internally and externally, the main category pages are getting more link love, would it still hurt to have all those subsequent pages getting indexed?
-
Ahh... the ultimate IA question that still doesnt have a clear anwer from the search engines. A ton of talk about this at the recent SMX Advanced at Seattle (as is with almost every one). I will try and summarize the common sentiment that i gathered from other pros. I will not claim that this is the correct way, but for now this is what i heard a bunch of people agree on:
- No index, follow the pagination links for all except page 1
- Do not block/hand it with robots.txt (in your case, you realyl cant since you have no identifying parameters in your url)
- If you had paginated parameters in the url you can also manage those in the Google & Bing WMT by telling the SE to ignore those certain parameters.
- Canonical to page 1 was a strategy that some retailers were using, and other want to try. Google reps tried to say this is not the way to do it, but others claim success from it.
- If you have a "View All" link that would display all the products in a longer form on a single page, canonical to that page (if its reasonable)
Notes: Depending on how your results/pages are generated, you will need to remember that they probably arent passing "juice". Any dynamic content is usually not "flow through" links from an SEO perspective (or even crawled sometimes).
The better approach to not orphaning your product pages is finding ways to link to them from other sources besides the results pages. For larger sites, its a hassle, buts thats a challenge we all face Here are some SEO tips for attacking the "orphan" issue:
- If you have product feeds, create a "deal" or "price change" feed. Create a twitter account that people can sign up for to follow these new deals or price changes on products. Push in your feed into tweets, and these will link to your product page, hence creating an in-link for search engines to follow.
- Can do the same with blogs or facebook, but not on a mass scale. Something a bit more useful for users like "top 10 deals of the week) and link to 10 products, or "Favorites for gifts" or something. over time, you can keep track of which product you recommend, and make sure you eventually hit all your products. Again, the point is creating at least 1 inbound link for search engines to follow.
- Create a static internal "product index page" (this is not for your sitemap page FYI) where either by category or some other structure, you make a static link to every product page you have on the site. Developers can have these links dynamically updated/inserted with some extra effort which will avoid manually needing to be updated.
- Create a xml sitemap index. Instead of everything being clumped into 1 xml sitemap for your site, try creating a sitemap index and with your product pages in their own sitemap. This may help with indexing those pages.
Hope that helps? Anyone else want to chime in?
-
I think that generally speaking you want to block search engines from indexing your category pages (use your sitemap and robots.txt to do this). I could be totally wrong here but that is how I setup my sites.
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
-
Why is my home page ranking much higher than my collection page?
Hi everyone, Why is my client's home page ranking high for a certain keyword phrase rather than a collection page I have which is well optimised for this keyword? The collection page is on the 10th SERPs page. I did see there were keywords used in the footer of page and the keyword was also used in some intro text on the home page so I removed the keyword from these two places nearly 2 weeks ago and requested google to reindex both the collection page and home page and I've not seen any improvement of the collection page's ranking in SERPs. I also changed the meta description and meta title as the ctr was poor but there wasn''t that many impressions either. It is a competitive keyword organically so maybe the collection page's authority is just not good enough compared to the competitors hence why they are choosing the home page as it has higher page authority however this still is not helpful to searchers who land on home page. Does anyone have any ideas of what else I can do to get google to rank the ocllection page higher for the keyword instead of home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TZ19820 -
Wildcarding Robots.txt for Particular Word in URL
Hey All, So I know that this isn't a standard robots.txt, I'm aware of how to block or wildcard certain folders but I'm wondering whether it's possible to block all URL's with a certain word in it? We have a client that was hacked a year ago and now they want us to help remove some of the pages that were being autogenerated with the word "viagra" in it. I saw this article and tried implementing it https://builtvisible.com/wildcards-in-robots-txt/ and it seems that I've been able to remove some of the URL's (although I can't confirm yet until I do a full pull of the SERPs on the domain). However, when I test certain URL's inside of WMT it still says that they are allowed which makes me think that it's not working fully or working at all. In this case these are the lines I've added to the robots.txt Disallow: /*&viagra Disallow: /*&Viagra I know I have the solution of individually requesting URL's to be removed from the index but I want to see if anybody has every had success with wildcarding URL's with a certain word in their robots.txt? The individual URL route could be very tedious. Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EvansHunt0 -
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making : ![Red ford truck](2554.jpg) changed to ![Red ford truck](6842.jpg)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
Robots.txt
Hi all, Happy New Year! I want to block certain pages on our site as they are being flagged (according to my Moz Crawl Report) as duplicate content when in fact that isn't strictly true, it is more to do with the problems faced when using a CMS system... Here are some examples of the pages I want to block and underneath will be what I believe to be the correct robots.txt entry... http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=viewNewContent&search_app=members&search_app_filters[forums][searchInKey]=&period=today&userMode=&followedItemsOnly= Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=core&module=search http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=reports&rcom=gallery&imageId=980&ctyp=image Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=core&module=reports http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=forums&module=post§ion=post&do=reply_post&f=146&t=741&qpid=13308 Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=forums&module=post http://www.XYZ.com/forum/gallery/sizes/182-promenade/small/ http://www.XYZ.com/forum/gallery/sizes/182-promenade/large/ Disallow: /forum/gallery/sizes/ Any help \ advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Changing my pages URL name - HELP NEEDED FAST
Hello, I need to change the URL name for a few pages on my site. The site was launched just recently, so it has no obvious ranking and traffic. My question is, what is the best practice for changing/deleting the page name? after deleting the page, should I go to Google webmaster tool and use URL Removal and remove the old page? I know that I have to also create a new XML sitemap file, but not sure about the old pages in google search result Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mdmoz0 -
Sudden Change In Indexed Pages
Every week I check the number of pages indexed by google using the "site:" function. I have set up a permanent redirect from all the non-www pages to www pages. When I used to run the function for the: non-www pages (i.e site:mysite.com), would have 12K results www pages (i.e site:www.mysite.com) would have about 36K The past few days, this has reversed! I get 12K for www pages, and 36K for non-www pages. Things I have changed: I have added canonical URL links in the header, all have www in the URL. My questions: Is this cause for concern? Can anyone explain this to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
202 error page set in robots.txt versus using crawl-able 404 error
We currently have our error page set up as a 202 page that is unreachable by the search engines as it is currently in our robots.txt file. Should the current error page be a 404 error page and reachable by the search engines? Is there more value or is it a better practice to use 404 over a 202? We noticed in our Google Webmaster account we have a number of broken links pointing the site, but the 404 error page was not accessible. If you have any insight that would be great, if you have any questions please let me know. Thanks, VPSEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VPSEO0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0