Question about duplicate listings on site for product listings.

[nick-name123]

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?

[Everett]

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!

[nick-name123]

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?

[TomRayner]

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-2

And 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.