Crawl Diagnostics: Duplicate Content Issues
-
The Moz crawl diagnostic is showing that I have some duplicate content issues on my site. For the most part, these are variations of the same product that are listed individually (i.e size/color).
What would be the best way to deal with this? Choose one variation of the product and add a canonical tag?
Thanks
-
I have the same issue and would like to locate an excellent SEO that can assist with this issue. MOZ does not make recommendations but would love to hear from others who may have worked with someone who is familiar with, and works with Shopify
-
Hi inhouseSEO,
The canonical tag would be an appropriate solution to these duplicate content issues. Another solution, depending on your CMS, would be to incorporate those variation pages into one hub page that allowed customers to select size and color without providing an individual page for each variation to search engines or users. There are a number of ways to accomplish depending upon what CMS your are using. It also depends on whether or not your site is using faceted navigation, which opens up a whole additional can of worms.
That's a very high level answer. If you want something more granular based on your type of navigation and CMS I encourage you to respond because a lot of other site owners here could probably benefit from the discussion.
Cheers,
Dana
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
-
Duplicate Content and Subdirectories
Hi there and thank you in advance for your help! I'm seeking guidance on how to structure a resources directory (white papers, webinars, etc.) while avoiding duplicate content penalties. If you go to /resources on our site, there is filter function. If you filter for webinars, the URL becomes /resources/?type=webinar We didn't want that dynamic URL to be the primary URL for webinars, so we created a new page with the URL /resources/webinar that lists all of our webinars and includes a featured webinar up top. However, the same webinar titles now appear on the /resources page and the /resources/webinar page. Will that cause duplicate content issues? P.S. Not sure if it matters, but we also changed the URLs for the individual resource pages to include the resource type. For example, one of our webinar URLs is /resources/webinar/forecasting-your-revenue Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SAIM_Marketing0 -
Shopify Duplicate Content in products
Hello Moz Community, New to Moz and looking forward to beginning my journey towards SEO education and improving our clients' sites. Our client's website is a Shopify store. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/ Our first Moz reports show 686 duplicate content issues. I will show the first 4 as examples. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-teardrop-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-orca-silver-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/silver-oval-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-spirit-silver-earrings As you can see, URL titles are unique. But I know that the content in each of those products have very similar product descriptions but not exactly. But since they have been flagged as a site issue by Moz, I am guessing that the content is 95% duplicate. So can a rel=canonical be the right solution for this type of duplicate content? Or should I be considering adding new content to each of 686 products to drop below the 95% threshold? Or another solution that I may not be aware of. Thanks in advance for your assistance and expertise! Sean
Technical SEO | | TheUpdateCompany1 -
Internal duplicated content on articles, when is too much?
I have an automotive rental blog with articles that explain the pros of renting a specific model. So in this articles the advantages of rental versus the buying of a new model. This advantages are a list with bullets like this:
Technical SEO | | markovald
Rental | Buy new car
Rental:
Free car insurance
Free assistance
etc.
Buy new car
You have to pay insurance
You have to pay assistance
etc. etc. I want to do this because i want to make all articles like landing pages...
This "advantages box" have 100 characters. The general length of articles on my blog is 500/600 characters. So i have an average of 15/20% internal duplicated content on all my articles. Is this bad for seo? Any alternatives?0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
SEOMOZ is giving me a number of duplicate content warnings related to pages that have an email a friend and/or email when back in stock versions of a page. I thought I had those blocked via my robots.txt file which contains the following... Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp Disallow: /Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp I had thought that the robot.txt file would solve this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | WaterSkis.com0 -
How damaging is duplicate content in a forum?
Hey all; I hunted around for this in previous questions in the Q&A and didn't see anything. I'm just coming back to SEO after a few years out of the field and am preparing recommendations for our web dev team. We use a custom-coded software for our forums, and it creates a giant swathe of duplicate content, as each post has its own link. For example: domain.com/forum/post_topic domain.com/forum/post_topic/post1 domain.com/forum/post_topic/post2 ...and so on. However, since every page of the forum defaults to showing 20 posts, that means that every single forum thread that's 20 posts long has 21 different pages with identical content. Now, our forum is all user-generated content and is not generally a source of much inbound traffic--with occasional exceptions--but I was curious if having a mess of duplicate content in our forums could damage our ability to rate well in a different directory of the site. I've heard that Panda is really cracking down on duplicate content, and last time I was current on SEO trends, rel="canonical" was the hot new thing that everyone was talking about, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Any guidance from the community would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | TheEnigmaticT0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles
A few weeks ago my error count went up for Duplicate Page Content and Titles. 4 errors in all. A week later the errors were gone... But now they are back. I made changes to the Webconfig over a month ago but nothing since. SEOmoz is telling me the duplicate content is this http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ and http://www.antiquebanknotes.com Thanks for any advise! This is the relevant web.config. <rewrite><rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.antiquebanknotes.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
<action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" www.antiquebanknotes.com="" {r:1"="">http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/{R:1}" />
</action></match></rule>
<rule name="Default Page" enabled="true" stopprocessing="true"><match url="^default.aspx$"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll"><add input="{REQUEST_METHOD}" pattern="GET"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="/"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite>0 -
Strange duplicate content issue
Hi there, SEOmoz crawler has identified a set of duplicate content that we are struggling to resolve. For example, the crawler picked up that this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/industry-insight/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career is a duplicate of this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career. The latter page's content is the original and can be found in the CMS admin area whilst the former page is the duplicate and has no entry in the CMS. So we don't know where to begin if the "duplicate" page doesn't exist in the CMS. The crawler states that this page www. creative-choices.co.uk/industry-insight/inside/creative-writing is the referrer page. Looking at it, only the original page's link is showing on the referrer page, so how did the crawler get to the duplicate page?
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0 -
Duplicate Content issue
I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic. Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version: http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes That page also has a link to a printer friendly version http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes and so on and so on....... Some of these pages are being included in Google's index. I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted. Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?
Technical SEO | | CPLDistribution0