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
-
How to answer for question "why xyz site is ranking for abc keyword" and not our website
Hi All, This is a layman question but would like to get a concrete answer for. I would like to know how to answer the questions like "Why our competitor is ranking for keyword ABC but not us"? What metrics or data can I showcase that gives logical answer. Please help in this regard. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avin1230 -
After adding a ssl certificate to my site I encountered problems with duplicate pages and page titles
Hey everyone! After adding a ssl certificate to my site it seems that every page on my site has duplicated it's self. I think that is because it has combined the www.domainname.com and domainname.com. I would really hate to add a rel canonical to every page to solve this issue. I am sure there is another way but I am not sure how to do it. Has anyone else ran into this problem and if so how did you solve it? Thanks and any and all ideas are very appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LovingatYourBest0 -
A/B Testing - Should I add product descriptions on my category landing pages as well as on product pages and if so . how to do this to avoid duplicate content
Hi All, I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design. My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view. My question is , previously in our list views we just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc.. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?... Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc. Any advice greatly appreciated as always thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Can pop-ups cause duplicate content issues in product pages?
Normally for ecommerce clients that have 100's of products we advise for size guides, installation guides etc to be placed as downloadable PDF resources to avoid huge blocks of content on multiple product pages. If content was placed in a popup e.g. fancybox, across multiple product pages would this be read by Google as duplicate content? Examples for this could be: An affiliate site with mutiple prices for a product and pop-up store reviews A clothing site with care and size guides What would be the best practice or setup?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
Client Question
Client Question - How much time this keyword takes to rank? Is there any tool or any calculation to find out the estimate time for a particular keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman1 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Duplicate Content Question
My understanding of duplicate content is that if two pages are identical, Google selects one for it's results... I have a client that is literally sharing content real-time with a partner...the page content is identical for both sites, and if you update one page, teh otehr is updated automatically. Obviously this is a clear cut case for canonical link tags, but I'm cuious about something: Both sites seem to show up in search results but for different keywords...I would think one domain would simply win out over the other, but Google seems to show both sites in results. Any idea why? Also, could this duplicate content issue be hurting visibility for both sites? In other words, can I expect a boost in rankings with the canonical tags in place? Or will rankings remain the same?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0 -
Analytics Question?
Is there a way to see in GA traffic from other IP address's. I want to subtract all the times I visit the site from my IP and get a real traffic %.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0