Moz crawl duplicate pages issues

[daedriccarl]

Hi

According to the moz crawl on my website I have in the region of 800 pages which are considered internal duplicates. I'm a little puzzled by this, even more so as some of the pages it lists as being duplicate of another are not.

For example, the moz crawler considers page B to be a duplicate of page A in the urls below: Not sure on the live link policy so ive put a space in the urls to 'unlive' them.

Page A http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/jeans/straight-jeans.html?manufacturer=3751

Page B http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/catalog/category/view/s/accessories/id/92/?cat=97&manufacturer=3603

One is a filter page for Curvety Jeans and the other a filter page for Charles Clinkard Accessories. The page titles are different, the page content is different so Ive no idea why these would be considered duplicate. Thin maybe, but not duplicate.

Like wise, pages B and C are considered a duplicate of page A in the following

Page A http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/bags.html?dir=desc&manufacturer=4050&order=price

Page B http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/catalog/category/view/s/purses/id/98/?manufacturer=4001

Page C http:// nuchic.co.uk/index.php/coats/waistcoats.html?manufacturer=4053

Again, these are product filter pages which the crawler would have found using the site filtering system, but, again, I cannot find what makes pages B and C a duplicate of A.

Page A is a filtered result for Great Plains Bags (filtered from the general bags collection). Page B is the filtered results for Chic Look Purses from the Purses section and Page C is the filtered results for Apricot Waistcoats from the Waistcoat section.

I'm keen to fix the duplicate content errors on the site before it goes properly live at the end of this month - that's why anyone kind enough to check the links will see a few design issues with the site -  however in order to fix the problem I first need to work out what it is and I can't in this case.

Can anyone else see how these pages could be considered a duplicate of each other please? Checking ive not gone mad!!

Thanks,

Carl

[MonicaOConnor]

These days, content is king. It looks like there are a lot of similar internal links in the source code of these pages. When you have thin/or no content, your internal link profile stands out a lot more.

What helped me overcome this for my company is focusing on aggregating customer reviews and having my customer service team generate unique product descriptions. Social media was great for reviews. We offered small coupons at first, and now our customers want to send reviews. Unique product descriptions might be tough for clothes, but, it isn't impossible.

Having a ridiculously duplicated internal link profile and no content is almost as detrimental to your organic rankings as a spammy external linking profile. You want to look like an eCommerce site and not an online catalog.

[daedriccarl]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the response. I tested the canonical side of things but was finding that it was stopping the filtered pages being indexed. While we could get 'Dresses' page indexed we couldn't get 'Black Dresses' 'X retailer brand Dresses' etc indexed. We found this a bit of an issue. On the filtering page the tag always pointed back to the category root.

We are using an seo plugin for Magento so maybe i will need to go back to the dev and ask them. I accept that not putting canonical tag on the filtering could lead to internal duplicate content issues if a product can be found a dresses, red dresses, x brand dresses, x brand red dresses and via price.

Even though the side is still a work in progress we are already seeing the filtered pages getting indexed and ranking fairly well. So, for example (I don't think we rank for this one) we are ranking for term such as Black Size 12 Evening Dress.  Sure, this term won't get millions of searches but long tail converts very well.  As much as I would love to be no1 for Dresses we are not going to get there for a long long time. Especially given the No1 brand for the term is DA 86 and has hundreds of thousands of links and over 2.1m G+ shares.

We are in a tricky position with the website. Normally we could rank for the filtered terms by product page easy enough, however with all the product pages being pulled externally we need to find an alternative.

[adamxj2]

Hello Carl!

So I checked out the pages you listed and I've had similar issues on my e-Commerce stores. There isn't much text on e-Commerce site pages and there tends to be a ton of links so that always causes a problem for me. E-commerce stores and duplicate content go hand in hand, unfortunately.

I would suggest starting with adding canonical tags into your meta data. There's a few settings in Magento you can turn on and that should take care of some of the problem. Here's a good resource http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/canonical-meta-tag

From there you might want to consider making your meta descriptions on the products a bit more unique. Changing out one word (the product name) doesn't make it different or a non-duplicate. When the content is super thin, it's harder to make the pages, titles, and descriptions unique to search engines. With e-Commerce product pages, I understand the trouble with having text on filter pages…it's just not practical and doesn't look right. But it's important to optimize where you can…the meta descriptions. Here's another resource for that http://moz.com/ugc/our-forgotten-friend-the-meta-description

Hope that helps!

[daedriccarl]

Might be worth me adding that I'm aware that all the product pages are duplicate content from other websites. The shop section of the website is an affiliate store. However, all the product pages are set as noindex to the search engines as a result of this. The internal link between the category pages and the product pages will be made nofollow in the coming days. If the engines cannot index the individual products then little point wasting bandwidth on them crawling 200,000 products!