Question about duplicate listings on site for product listings.
-
We list products on our site and suspect that we have been hit by Panda as we are duplicating listings across our own site. Not intentionally, we just have multiple pages listings the same content as they fall into multiple categories.
Has anyone else had the same issue and if so how did you deal with it?.. Have you seen a change in results/rankings due to the changes you made?
-
Hello Nick,
It sounds like you're talking about category pages that link to product pages. I do recommend putting unique content on category pages, as they target different phases of a buying cycle (and keywords). For example...
"Blue Widgets" is a top-level category search.
"Blue Widgets for Men" is a category search."Men's V9 Blue Widget" (not the singular use of widget) is most likely a product search.
All three pages types should have their own unique content using keywords specific to that stage of the buying cycle, and displaying content that is useful to that stage of the buying cycle. For example...
"Blue Widgets" ---> Explain how to choose a blue widget. Which sub-category should they check out? Help them decide where to go next. Help them narrow their search.
"Men's Blue Widgets" ---> Explain the difference between brands and perhaps leading models. What are their needs and budget? Which are the high-end, top-of-the-line men's blue widgets, and which are affordable and reliable options, or entry-level widgets? Educate them.
"Men's V9 Blue Widget" ---> Explain the product. What are the features that either set it apart or make it a good value for the money?
The linking strategy can work this way as well. Naturally you're going to be passing pagerank from category pages into sub-categories and into products. This happens naturally on most sites because that is the natural flow of a purchasing path and a logical taxonomy. However you should also be passing pagerank back up if you want to help category pages rank. Enhanced produce descriptions give you an opportunity to do this.
Good luck!
-
Thanks for the detailed response Tom..
We have for example
A = Listings page with brief of all products
linking to B,C,D,E,F,G etc.. which are all specific pages for those products..
The B - G's rank ok for non competitive terms on the page but page's A dont rank so well.
The problem about no indexing A is that I think the other pages will get lost and have importance taken away from them..
Canonical from second pages of A listings yes, but what I was also thinking to do is put some unique content on page A in order to make that page more unique..Any thoughts on that?
-
Hi there
There are a few options here. Both revolve around making sure only version of your product listings is instructed to be indexed, so that you can promote that version via SEO.
The first solution would be to 301 redirect any duplications to one version of your product listings. This is the quickest and most absolute solution to duplicate listings, as it ensures only version of them remains live. However, depending on your CMS, this might not be possible.
The second solution would be to add robots instructions to the duplicate listings that instructs Google not to index those pages. You can do this by either adding code to the page itself or by using a robots.txt file. The code you'd need to add to the tag on the page is - however, if your CMS is producing duplicate URLs but only using one physical page, you may want to avoid this as it could block all versions of the page. In which case, you could add each duplicate URL to your robots.txt file, specifying you'd like to block them from being indexed, such as:
User Agent: *
Disallow: /example-page-1
Disallow: /example-page-2And so on. I like this robots.txt tutorial guide to learn more about how you can do this.
Finally, you could add canonical tags to each page to specify which version of the URL is the one you want to rank and be indexed, which should prevent others from being considered as well. For example, for a product listing page like: http://www.example.com/category-1/product-page-version-1 - if you want that page to be indexed, you will want to add a canonical tag in the of the code that reads:
Now, if that is the only physical web page that exists and your CMS generates additional, duplicate URLs with how it works, you will only need to add that canonical once. However, if other webpages actually exist in your CMS and server, you will need to add the same tag to the other duplicate pages. This basically tells Google and Bing: "Hey, this page is a duplicate, ignore this one and rank this one instead". Moz has a great guide on canonical usage here.
Dr. Pete also wrote a guide guide on canonical usage and how you can use it for products that are pretty much the same, but have slight differences such as sizes, colour etc.
I hope this helps answer your question - remember, the key here is to instruct Google that you don't want them to index the duplicates and that you don't have them to manipulate rankings. You're trying to have only one version indexed, and if others exist outside of redirects, you have instructed which version should be kept and which ones ignored.
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
-
Mirror from my site
hi to all i find 2 site they do mirror my site and send back link to all my pages. do you thing its bad for my seo ?? my site is https://android-apk.org mirror sites | Who links the most | fryeboysent.com | 1,342,613 |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moztabliq1
| ficyexp.cl | 934,654 | |0 -
Is there an issue with my site?
Been mostly hanging around top of page two for the last couple of years for “Liverpool Wedding photographer” although got myself on page 1 for “Liverpool photographer” I have split the title of the page to target these two keywords. I took the Liverpool photographer off the title to see if it was being detrimental to the “Liverpool wedding photographer” I didn’t see no increase in ranking so put it back as I get a bit of commercial work from it. Since last year I have got onto page 1 at least three times around position 5-6. Within a week or two I start sliding down again and end up back at top of page two. I could understand this slow push out if my competitors were busy SEO wise but from what I have seen they are not. There is a guy using the keywords in URL and calls himself “Liverpool wedding photographer” last time I checked he literally had no links but is in the first 5 positions. I have I think a better link profile than every one else. Although I am on and off with Facebook and Instagram, (more off) so that probably isn’t helping. Although I have a colleague in the video side of things and he doesn’t use social media at all and it hasn’t harmed him. A few years ago I was burned quite badly by a total charlatan. He sunk my home page to page 4. He talked the talk about creating landing pages but his methods were shoddy to say the least. I can’t believe I was taken in by him, although I was only with him for 2 months. He was still using spammy link techniques to generate lots of toxic links for me! I disavowed all of his links and put the keywords back on the home page and was back to my usual top of page 2 position within a week. Since then I have disavowed all directory links and anything not wedding related. I have an article which ranks 1st or second for “Nikon CLS”. I have also another article of 2000 words or so on another reasonable placed photography website. A few links from other vendors or people I have taken photographs for. I have about 10 featured weddings with a link on 4 good weddings blogs. I don’t think a massive amount of blog comments although I have stopped doing this. If I look at most of the competitors these are their main links, with directories as well! Last winter I put a quite substantial article about documentary wedding photography on my home page. I flew to number 2, although I photographed The World Transformed (the alternative labour conference in Liverpool). I got a lot of clicks to a gallery page (few thousand off social media} so I don’t know if that coincided with it. Same thing – watching the website go down a few positions every day until within just over a week or two I was about 4<sup>th</sup> on page 2! Its like my website is on a spring which can push into page 1 but rebounds back to top of page 2. I am staring to worry that my site has been marked as a bad character in some way because I get what seems to be rough treatment from google compared to my peers. I have written I think 4 or 5 (1500 word) articles the last couple of months talking about lenses and wedding photography related topics and Google pushed me back to page 1, peaking At position 5. I was there for a few weeks and then the slide happened again. Bit demoralised at the moment, what to do? Any help or pointers would be most appreciated. Best wishes. David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Duplicate Content For Product Alternative listing
Hi I have a tricky one here. cloudswave is a directory of products and we are launching new pages called Alternatives to Product X This page displays 10 products that are an alternative to product X (Page A) Lets say now you want to have the alternatives to a similar product within the same industry, product Y (Page B), you will have 10 product alternatives, but this page will be almost identical to Page A as the products are in similar and in the same industry. Maybe one to two products will differ in the 2 listings. Now even SEO tags are different, aren't those two pages considered duplicate content? What are your suggestions to avoid this problem? thank you guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RSedrati0 -
Business Listing sites SEO
How websites like justdial, askme, indiamart, tradeindia do their search engine optimization? Is it different from normal seo? please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Should I use individual product pages for different formats of the same product?
Hi All -- I'm working with a publishing client who is launching a new site. They have a large product catalogue offered in a number of format types (print, ebook, online learning, packages) with each one possessing a unique ISBN code. From past experience, I know that ISBN codes can be a really important ranking factor. We are currently trying to sort out product page guidelines. The proposed methods are: A single product page for all formats. The user then has the option to select which format they wish to purchase. The page would contain all key descriptors for each format, including: individual ISBN, format, title, price, author, etc. We would then use schema mark-up just to assist search engines with understanding and crawling. BUT we worry that the single page won't rank as well as say an invidual product page with a unique ISBN in the URL (for example: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470573325.html) Which leads to the next option... Individual URLs for each format. We understand that most e-commerce guidelines state you shouldn't dilute link equity amongst multiple pages with very similar products and descriptions. BUT we want searchers to be able to search by individual ISBN and still find that specific format within the SERPs. This seems to rule out canonicalizing, because we don't prefer one format over the other and still want say the ebook to show up as much as the print version. If anyone has any other options or considerations that we haven't thought about, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, U
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HarborOneBank0 -
Should I let Google crawl my production server if the site is still under development?
I am building out a brand new site. It's built on Wordpress so I've been tinkering with the themes and plug-ins on the production server. To my surprise, less than a week after installing Wordpress, I have pages in the index. I've seen advice in this forum about blocking search bots from dev servers to prevent duplicate content, but this is my production server so it seems like a bad idea. Any advice on the best way to proceed? Block or no block? Or something else? (I know how to block, so I'm not looking for instructions). We're around 3 months from officially launching (possibly less). We'll start to have real content on the site some time in June, even though we aren't planning to launch. We should have a development environment ready in the next couple of weeks. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoItHappy0 -
Do I have to tell WBT site moved to a subdirectory on another internal site?
I am moving content from one site to another and redirecting the DNS from www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com/old-site. I have put the 301 in place but I wanted to make sure I have to also tell Webmaster Tools to change the old site to the new domain? We still want the old domain name to answer and redirect to www.newsite.com/old-site. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed. The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote. As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office. The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form. The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag. Manually changing the descriptions is not an option. Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"? Any other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0