Duplicate page titles and Content in Woocommerce

[jeeyer]

Hi Guys,

I'm new to Moz and really liking it so far!
I run a eCommerce site on Wordpress + WooCommerce and ofcourse use Yoast for SEO optimalisation

I've got a question about my first Crawl report which showed over 600 issues! I've read that this is something that happens more often (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success).

Most of them are categorized under:
1. Duplicate Page Titles or;
2. Duplicate Page Content.

Duplicate Page Titles:
These are almost only: product category pages and product tags. Is this problem beeing solved by giving them the right SEO SERP? I see that a lot of categories don't have a proper SEO SERP set up in yoast! Do I need to add this to clear this issue, or do I need to change the actual Title? And how about the Product tags?

Another point (bit more off-topic) I've read here:  http://moz.com/community/q/yoast-seo-plugin-to-index-or-not-to-index-categories  that it's advised to noindex/follow Categories and Tags but isn't that a wierd idea to do for a eCommerce site?!

Duplicate Page Content:
Same goes here almost only Product Categories and product tags that are displayed as duplicate Page content! When I check the results I can click on a blue button for example "+ 17 duplicates" and that shows me (in this case 17 URLS) but they are not related to the fist in any way so not sure where to start here?

Thanks for taking the time to help out!
Joost

[jeeyer]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the great answer! Really helpfull.
Best,

Joost

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Joost - I'll try to tackle each of the questions one by one:

• About categories, I'm not sure of the specifics, but you'll definitely want to find a category variable that just pulls in the category name for you. What that variable is, I am not sure off the top of my head.
• The way I'd look at it - you don't want to end up with a "category" that's so deep or specific it only have a couple products in it. You may as well rank a product page instead. So long as your categories have maybe 5+ products which makes it useful for the user, you'd be fine I think.
• I wouldn't worry about duplicate content. The "duplicate content" scare from years back is only a penalty if you are scraping content from other sites and building a whole website off of other people's content. I would just judge each page individually and aim for it being as helpful to the user as possible - in terms of trying to predict their questions, fears, doubts, etc in terms of actually purchasing the product

[jeeyer]

Thanks Ryan, clear as a bell!

[RyanPurkey]

There was a nice discussion here on tags: http://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-tag-pages-noindex that still applies. In general they tend to eliminate duplicate content issues when noindexed.

[jeeyer]

Hey Dan!

Thanks for taking the time to write back.

I found your article very helpfull! But I wasn't sure if I coud use your tips because you expressly stated that you were talking about a normal wordpress blog and not eCommerce. So really nice you took the time to look in to this matter.

It think the  problem with my duplicate page titles has started when I set a template for the product categories because it's not working. I've used the template: %%ct_product_cat%% | %%sitename%% but I see a lot of product categories return:  (empty) | %%sitename %%. And all of these don't have an individual SEO title set by myself. The ones that have an individual SEO title will return that one.

Just to make clear, I've done this because %%category%% is also not an option to use as template. I followed this link http://zendenwebdesign.com/woocommerce-product-category-taxonomy-with-wordpress-seo-by-yoast/

About the deepness of indexing:
With your last bulletpoint you mean that: If I have a category and within that category products for let's say sunglasses (and I target the same keyword for the category and the article as well) it depends on which will rank better (category or ind. product) for the highest index?

For my individual product pages I use tabs (theme shortcodes that output tabs on frontend) I use 4:

• About (product info content optimized around keyword)
• Brand (brand info)
• Sizing
• Shipping

The Brand info and shipping tab are on a lot of product pages the same. I've got multiple products from a brand and the shipping is for every product (+300) the same. Although Yoast returns a Good SEO score (so does Scribe) do you think this can be seen as duplicate content? Is it better to load this kind of information directly in to the product page template? For less duplicate content issues? (not sure if it even will be seens as duplicate).

Best.Joost

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Joost

Dan here (I wrote that Setting Up WordPress article )

Without seeing your site, it's tough to be 100% sure, but here's what I would make sure you're doing:

• Noindex subpages of archives
• Index categories
• Noindex tags
• Set up title templates for categories so maybe they say "Browse Category Name - Sitename" (something call to action like for eCommerce)

The key with how "deep" you index categories may depend on:

• search volume
• how many extra pages per level that causes to get indexed etc
• where it starts competing with actual products that could rank instead

I find it's good to hit that sweet spot where you don't get a ridiculous amount of pages indexed, but are deep enough in the categories with search volume to not miss out on any traffic.

[jeeyer]

Ok very clear. I will determine per category if I want to index them or not. And keep in mind the uniqueness and potential rank.

I indeed don't have to be way too focused on the results from the crawl. But our categories rank really
Bad (so then the first guess is; maybe because of duplicate content moz is telling me).

Or because they are actually "empty" pages with products that are categorized in it. But that goes for every ecommerce site, right? Maybe I need to write a short description per category and style it with HTML to make it more attractive and give it more content.

How are your thoughts on tags?

[RyanPurkey]

Right. It's kind of a combination of categories you want to rank for and ones that are populated and active enough to rank. Brand C Shirts would be fine, but Brand C Short Sleeve shirts could be too diluted. You're on the right track.

Also, there are some instances where the Moz tool just doesn't align with what you would not consider duplicate content and in those cases feel free to ignore it, especially if those pages are ranking well and performing well in terms of conversion / funnel.  Cheers!

[jeeyer]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for clearing this out for me! Sounds like a good appraoch! With top level you mean the parents categories? Or categories that I want to rank for?

For example we have a webstore and sell clothing from Scandinavian cloting brands. If I should index only the parents I get: tshits/pants/sweaters/jackets etc (these are to general imo). But the sub-categories which display the brands are much better to rank because they get a lot more search volume for example.

This is the structure we use:
Shirts:

• Brand A (url is /product-category/shirts/branda-shirts) <- these are keywords that our target audience use when they search for shirts from that brand! high potential for us
• Brand B (url is /product-category/shirts/brandb-shirts)
• Brand C (url is /product-category/shirts/brandc-shirts)

Let me know what your thoughts are.Joost

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Joost. The reasoning behind noindexing category and tag pages is because they have a high tendency to show up as duplicate content--as you've just experienced. People like to keep them as part of their site due to user friendliness but often these pages on their own are a reshuffling of content and can be highly repetitive from a search engine perspective. Ideally you keep your top level categories that are unique within the index and noindex the rest.  Feel free to keep links within your site as followed.  Cheers!