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
-
Crawling/indexing of near duplicate product pages
Hi, Hope someone can help me out here. This is the current situation: We sell stones/gravel/sand/pebbles etc. for gardens. I will take a type of pebbles and the corresponding pages/URL's to illustrate my question --> black beach pebbles. We have a 'top' product page for black beach pebbles on which you can find different types of quantities (differing from 20kg untill 1600 kg). There is not any search volume related to the different quantities The 'top' page does not link to the pages for the different quantities The content on the pages for the different quantities is not exactly the same (different price + slightly different content). But a lot of the content is the same. Current situation:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD
- Most pages for the different quantities do not have internal links (about 95%) But the sitemap does contain all of these pages. Because the sitemap contains all these URL's, google frequently crawls them (I checked the logfiles) and has indexed them. Problems: Google spends its time crawling irrelevant pages --> our entire website is not that big, so these quantity URL's kind of double the total number of URL's. Having url's in the sitemap that do not have an internal link is a problem on its own All these pages are indexed so all sorts of gravel/pebbles have near duplicates. My solution: remove these URL's from the sitemap --> that will probably stop Google from regularly crawling these pages Putting a canonical on the quantity pages pointing to the top-product page. --> that will hopefully remove the irrelevant (no search volume) near duplicates from the index My questions: To be able to see the canonical, google will need to crawl these pages. Will google still do that after removing them from the sitemap? Do you agree that these pages are near duplicates and that it is best to remove them from the index? A few of these quantity pages do have intenral links (a few procent of them) because of a sale campaign. So there will be some (not much) internal links pointing to non-canonical pages. Would that be a problem? Thanks a lot in advance for your help! Best!1 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Duplicate site (disaster recovery) being crawled and creating two indexed search results
I have a primary domain, toptable.co.uk, and a disaster recovery site for this primary domain named uk-www.gtm.opentable.com. In the event of a disaster, toptable.co.uk would get CNAMEd (DNS alias) to the .gtm site. Naturally the .gtm disaster recover domian is an exact match to the toptable.co.uk domain. Unfortunately, Google has crawled the uk-www.gtm.opentable site, and it's showing up in search results. In most cases the gtm urls don't get redirected to toptable they actually appear as an entirely separate domain to the user. The strong feeling is that this duplicate content is hurting toptable.co.uk, especially as .gtm.ot is part of the .opentable.com domain which has significant authority. So we need a way of stopping Google from crawling gtm. There seem to be two potential fixes. Which is best for this case? use the robots.txt to block Google from crawling the .gtm site 2) canonicalize the the gtm urls to toptable.co.uk In general Google seems to recommend a canonical change but in this special case it seems robot.txt change could be best. Thanks in advance to the SEOmoz community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OpenTable0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
What to do with non-existing products (removed products)?
Hello, I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display. In order not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products. The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up). What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct? ---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO --------- The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...) Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination). Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two. Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product. The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012... Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar. Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's? Thanks0 -
What on-page/site optimization techniques can I utilize to improve this site (http://www.paradisus.com/)?
I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0