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
-
Dynamic Pages with No Results Causing Thin Content
Hi Mozers, We have dynamic listing pages that pull in clinical trial results for specific disease types. Sometimes diseases have clinical trials and sometimes they don't. This means that sometimes the page will have zero results and sometimes it will return results. We have a sizable number of these so that when there are zero results, these pages look like thin content. What is the recommended method of dealing with this? Is there a way of doing a conditional noindex where the page is indexed if results are pulled in and and not indexed when the page returns zero results? If we can do this, should we? Will it confuse Google and send negative signals? Any guidance/thoughts are much appreciated! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Huge e-commerce site migration - what to do with product pages?
My very large e-commerce client is about to undergo a site migration in which every product page URL will be changing. I am already planning my 301 redirect process for the top ~1,000 pages on the site (categories, products, and more) but this will not account for the more than 1,000 products on the site. The client specified that they don't want to implement much more than 1,000 redirects so as to avoid impacting site performance. What is the best way to handle these pages without causing hundreds of 404 errors on site migration day? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Duplicate Titles caused by blog
Hey I've done some research and understand the canonical tags and rel prev and rel next, but I wanted to get someones opinion on if we needed it since the articles are somewhat independent of each in content (there's a focus on both banks and accountants) We have over 68 pages of blog materials http://www.sageworks.com/blog/default.aspx?page=7 through http://www.sageworks.com/blog/default.aspx?page=68 Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh1230 -
Best practice with duplicate content. Cd
Our website has recently been updated, now it seems that all of our products pages look like this cdnorigin.companyname.com/catagory/product Google is showing these pages within the search. rather then companyname.com/catagory/product Each product page does have a canaonacal tag on that points to the cdnorigin page. Is this best practice? i dont think that cdnorigin.companyname etc looks very goon in the search. is there any reason why my designer would set the canonical tags up this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Is an RSS feed considered duplicate content?
I have a large client with satellite sites. The large site produces many news articles and they want to put an RSS feed on the satellite sites that will display the articles from the large site. My question is, will the rss feeds on the satellite sites be considered duplicate content? If yes, do you have a suggestion to utilize the data from the large site without being penalized? If no, do you have suggestions on what tags should be used on the satellite pages? EX: wrapped in tags? THANKS for the help. Darlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXeSEO0 -
Migrating a site from a standalone site to a subdivision of large .gov.uk site
The scenario We’ve been asked by a client, a Non-Government Organisation who are being absorbed by a larger government ministry, for help with the SEO of their site. They will be going from a reasonably large standalone site to a small sub-directory on a high authority government site and they want some input on how best to maintain their rankings. They will be going from the Number 1 ranked site in their niche (current site domainRank 59) to being a sub directory on a domainRank 100 site). The current site will remain, but as a members only resource, behind a paywall. I’ve been checking to see the impact that it had on a related site, but that one has put a catch all 302 redirect on it’s pages so is losing the benefit of a it’s historical authority. My thoughts Robust 301 redirect set up to pass as much benefit as possible to the new pages. Focus on rewriting content to promote most effective keywords – would suggest testing of titles, meta descriptions etc but not sure how often they will be able to edit the new site. ‘We have moved’ messaging going out to webmasters of existing linking sites to try to encourage as much revision of linking as possible. Development of link-bait to try and get the new pages seen. Am I going about this the right way? Thanks in advance. Phil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smrs-digital0 -
How to Create automate Content for Big Ecommerce Site
Hello guys, Im planning to do some big changes on my ecommerce, On my ecommerce i normally ship services so tons of relative products but it will change from each brand. For example i would like to say the same thing on each product landing page but just changing the keyword for the proper product lading page , but my fear is that this will look like duplicate content. How can i deal with information on each landing page on a ecommerce that have more than 1k on services. I dont want to write this differently on each 1k on pages for products since they are doing the same thing but in different brands. I hope you can help me on this. Note: Is there any source of doing this type of Seo for automate page service generator?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aldovacano0 -
Duplicate Content On A Subdomain
Hi, We have a client who is currently close to completing a site specifically aimed at the UK market (they're doing this in-house so we've had no say in how it will work). The site will almost be a duplicate (in terms of content, targeted keywords etc.) of a section of the main site (that sits on the root domain) - the main site is targeted toward the US. The only difference will be certain spellings and currency type. If this new UK site were to sit on a sub domain of the main site, which is a .com, will this cause duplicate content issues? I know that there wouldn't be an issue if the new site were to be on a separate .co.uk domain (according to Matt Cutts), but it looks like the client wants it to be on a sub domain. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasarrow0