How should I manage duplicate content caused by a guided navigation for my e-commerce site?
-
I am working with a company which uses Endeca to power the guided navigation for our e-commerce site. I am concerned that the duplicate content generated by having the same products served under numerous refinement levels is damaging the sites ability to rank well, and was hoping the Moz community could help me understand how much of an impact this type of duplicate content could be having. I also would love to know if there are any best practices for how to manage this type of navigation. Should I nofollow all of the URLs which have more than 1 refinement used on a category, or should I allow the search engines to go deeper than that to preserve the long tail? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
-
This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much you have really helped me out.
-
Hi there,
My former agency has a good post on pagination that you might find useful: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html
You definitely want to cut down on duplicate content as much as possible - let me know if that post does the trick for the ecommerce question!
Cheers
-
Hi David,
I would like to give you an article at hand:
Maybe you noticed it already? It
s hard to give you a recommendation for the refinement levels... in general I would advise you to be very careful with that... to me it sounds not so bad what you
ve done so far... -
You are absolutely right about nofollow overuse being a trust factor. I had not thought about that aspect of this issue, and thank you for bringing it up. In regards to using canonical and rel prev / next, I am not sure what an implementation of this would look like. I added in rel canonical pointing to the www version of the page URL without any unnecessary parameters, and I am familiar with the idea of having a "Show All" page so as to avoid pagination (we added in our pagination parameters into Google Webmaster Tools instead). Would you recommend using canonical to roll up results pages to a category and parent refinement level, and if so how many refinements would you recommend before drawing the line?
Thank you again,
David
-
The only differentiation (if there is any) you can make when it comes up to DC is between partial and "normal" DC... keep in mind that any type (!!!) of DC won`t do your site any good! Avoid DC whenever and wherever you can! Under all circumstances... I do not know Endeca but dealing with DC caused by a navigational structure is a serious problem, especially within a shop system.
There are differnt ways to fight DC or to confine it... most common is rel=prev/next or rel=canonical... these are alternatives and never perfect solutions but there are lots of scenarios where this is a big help.
I would be careful with follow and nofollow... if you let the robot follow everything this might lead to lots of errors in the scenario you describe but on the other hand setting many URLs to nofollow can also harm your site because it`s not a very trustworthy signal for Google
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
-
Duplicate content hidden behind tabs
Just looking at an ecommerce website and they've hidden their product page's duplicate content behind tabs on the product pages - not on purpose, I might add. Is this a legitimate way to hide duplicate content, now that Google has lowered the importance and crawlability of content hidden behind tabs? Is this a legitimate tactic to tackle duplicate content? Your thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Penalties for duplicate content
Hello!We have a website with various city tours and activities listed on a single page (http://vaiduokliai.lt/). The list changes accordingly depending on filtering (birthday in Vilnius, bachelor party in Kaunas, etc.). The URL doesn't change. Content changes dynamically. We need to make URL visible for each category, then optimize it for different keywords (for example city tours in Vilnius for a list of tours and activities in Vilnius with appropriate URL /tours-in-Vilnius).The problem is that activities overlap very often in different categories, so there will be a lot of duplicate content on different pages. In such case, how severe penalty could be for duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpuzakov0 -
How to handle duplicate content with Bible verses
Have a friend that does a site with bible verses and different peoples thoughts or feelings on them. Since I'm an SEO he came to me with questions and duplicate content red flag popped up in my head. My clients all generate their own content so not familiar with this world. Since Bible verses appear all over the place, is there a way to address this from an SEO standpoint to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge0 -
Multiply domains and duplicate content confusion
I've just found out that a client has multiple domains which are being indexed by google and so leading me to worry that they will be penalised for duplicate content. Wondered if anyone could confirm a) are we likely to be penalised? and b) what should we do about it? (i'm thinking just 301 redirect each domain to the main www.clientdomain.com...?). Actual domain = www.clientdomain.com But these also exist: www.hostmastr.clientdomain.com www.pop.clientdomain.com www.subscribers.clientdomain.com www.www2.clientdomain.com www.wwwww.clientdomain.com ps I have NO idea how/why all these domains exist I really appreciate any expertise on this issue, many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bisibee10 -
What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?
I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
What is the proper way to display e-commerce product guides? PDF / JPG?
Hi, On each product page in my e-commerce site, I have a link to show a certificate of authenticity for the product. (similar to any guide in an e-commerce site). I also have the details as plain text on the page, but this is required. What is the correct way to show it, using PDF or JPG? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0