Category descriptions and magento
-
Hi
Any eCommerce experts out there, please? I run a magento store and am looking to improve the performance of my category pages in the listings, to aid this I have created category descriptions - a hundred or so words about what, for example, a Maxi Dress is, an example can be seen here http:// yochic.co.uk/dress-267864/ maxi.html (I have broken the link as not sure on the linking policy of the forum).
I have noticed, however, that this category description is appearing all on sub pages of the section, so it is on page 1,2,3,4 etc. Is this likely to lead to me receiving a penalty for internal duplicate content?
The store uses rel="next" in all the category pages, so shouldn't that help limit any problems caused by the duplication of the page descriptions? I notice that when I search for a sub page, 2, 3, 4 etc in Google using the url of page two http://yochic.co.uk/dress-267864/maxi.html?p=2 it returns the first page, so am i right in thinking with the tags that Google sees all the sub pages as being page one.
In which case, doesn't that limit my ability to rank for the products listed on pages 2+? Long story short, the site cannot rank it's product pages because the vast majority of the product descriptions are 100% duplicate because the site is an affiliate fashion store.
Many thanks
Carl
-
Hello Carl,
I tried to access those pages but didn't find anything on those URLs even after fixing them.
The rel next/prev is being used properly for the issue you're having.
I think the bigger issue is that you say all of your product descriptions are duplicates of any other site using the same affiliate feed. That is a big no-no and I don't think relying on category pages to rank for product searches is a good business plan. I hate to say it, but these types of sites really just don't do very well these days.
Nevertheless, your question was about the paginated URLs and I think the rel next/prev has you covered there. If you are more worried about it you can use a rel = canonical tag to ensure the first page in the series is seen as the canonical version.
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
-
Magento - How to avoid duplicate content on products that span different sites.
We have 4 Magento store fronts that operate out of the same backend. Is there any way to safely have products that span multiple stores without getting a duplicate content penalty? thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Shop-Sq0 -
Too many posts in a category?
Does having a post in too many categories have a negative effect on SEO? I have some posts in around 15 categories on my site.
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Category Advice
Hello, Our website is http://crazymikesapps.com and it is approximately 4 3/4 years old. Ths app review and app video blog started out as a hobby and since 02/2011 it has been our full-time business. However, we have been plagued with poor SEO decisions made in the early years as well as horrible webmaster and blog management. We have been working very hard to correct all issues and started with a Yoast website audit 1 year ago. We implemented a site redesign and we are mostly happy with this for now. However, we experience a 70% to 75% bounce rate daily and we have just begun using best SEO practices for blog post creation and I feel like our category taxonomy is horrible. About 8 months ago I had 34,000 tags, which I deleted and now I believe we have around 34. I think we have gone the other way in using categories too much and we are under utilizing tags. The problem is we have 2 different operating systems iOS and Android for App Categories that are extensive, we have added numerous sub categories per our Yoast report, but for starters we are not all about games apps and have 40 to 50 game sub categories. My question is, looking at our Categories, would you suggest converting some into tags. Also we have a problem with iPhone Apps, iPad Apps, Android Apps, Kindle Fire Apps because we use these as tags for a filter feature for our app category pages. But, we also have Mobile Apps iPhone Apps, etc. as categories. Any advice would be great and sorry for the bloviating. thank you Mike
On-Page Optimization | | crazymikesapps10 -
Adding Google Authorship To Wordpress Category Pages
How can I add google authorship to my wordpress category pages? I use the 'google author link' plugin which adds it to posts and pages but not categories?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
SEO for New Magento Site??!?
Hi All, We have had a new site delivered by our developers (hurrah...the old one was to terrible for words) but we seem to be having a lot of issues with the new Magento platform. What they have done is used the community version and tried to customize it. I came on to this project about a month into the build and although Magento does seem to do a lot things well there do seem to be some problems. From an SEO prespective we have seen some increase on some search terms and a drop of in others. I would be interested in hearing from other Magento users about their experiences with this platform and any ideas on how to crank up the activity. Our site is at www.nationwidepharmacies.co.uk . There are few odd bits including the side navigation which seems to be very clunky and not overly customizable in this version. Any useful criticism would also be well received. Look forward to hearing Nic
On-Page Optimization | | nicc19760 -
Ecommerce On-Site SEO: Keywords in Category Descriptions
Hello, I'm doing on-site SEO for a client's ecommerce site. Are 160 words enough for a category description? I'm using the keywords once at the top of the description, and once at the bottom of the description, with the ones at the bottom reworded so that they are the keywords with a different word order. I used to put the keywords in 3 times but it just feels like stuffing. Is twice, worded differently the second time, enough for a category description? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Duplicate meta descriptions
Hi all, I'm using Yoast's SEO plugin and when I run a On Page report card here on SEOMOZ it says there are 2 descriptions tags I've been trying to fix this but can't (I'm new!) Anyone any ideas on this? Thanks Elaine
On-Page Optimization | | elaineryan0 -
Optimizing Wordpress Categories
I’m trying to optimize the category links in the wordpress blog http://blog.reputationforward.com. I’m in the process of installing the Yeost SEO plugin and am going to revise the Category Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and slugs. I’m also in the process of using Tags so that I can get the posts that appear in a category to be specific to that category (currently the publisher is listing posts in multiple categories: See “Business Management Category”). But other than that, is there anything else I can do to optimize each category?
On-Page Optimization | | EricVallee341