How to avoid duplicate content with e-commerce and multiple stores?
-
We are currently developing an e-commerce platform that will feed multiple stores. Each store will have its own domain and URL, but all stores will offer products that come from the same centralized database.
That means all products will have the same image, description and title across all stores. What would be the best practice to avoid getting stores penalized for duplicate content?
-
Hi there
Here are some great resources for you and your time to explore:
Thin & Duplicate Content: eCommerce SEO
7 Critical SEO Errors of E-commerce Websites
The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites I would also suggest looking into Google's duplicate content resources as there are tons of great tips for you to look into, including pagination, parameters, and canonical tags.I would make sure that your on-site SEO is unique for each product as well.
Hope this all helps - good luck!
-
That means all products will have the same image, description and title across all stores. What would be the best practice to avoid getting stores penalized for duplicate content?
You will be penalized for duplicate content if you do this. At some point in the future it will happen. Tellin' you right now this plan is doomed long term.
So, you can wait for it to happen or you can do a proper job from the start and create unique, substantive content for each website.
-
The first question is why are you going to have many stores doing the same thing, is each one unique in some way?
Without more information as to why you are doing it this way it is hard to help with the best way to handle it. -
Hi there,
As you're aware it is best to have unique content across the different sites.
An approach could be to have Information on the products that are only displayed on the separate websites so your data could look like:- Title
- Description
- Price
- Site 1 introduction
- Site 2 Introduction
- Site 3 Introduction
Then each site can have different content whilst maintaining one centralised dataset.
Hope this inspires!
Kind Regards
Jimmy
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
-
Getting rid of duplicate content remaining from old misconfiguration
Hi Friends,We have recently (about a month ago) launched a new website, and during the review of that site spotted a serious misconfiguration of our old terrible WP siteThis misconfiguration, which may have come from either sitemaps or internal links or both lead to displaying our french german and english sites on each others’ domains. This should be solved now, but they still show in SERPS: The big question is: What’s the best way to safely remove those from SERPS?We haven’t performed as well as we wanted for a while and we believe this could be one of the issues:Try to search for instance“site:pissup.de stag do -junggesellenabschied” to find english pages on our german domain, each link showing either 301 or 404.This was cleaned to show 301 or 404 when we launched our new site 4 weeks ago, but I can still see the results in SERPS, so I assume they still count negatively?Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pissuptours0 -
Could duplicate (copied) content actually hurt a domain?
Hi 🙂 I run a small wordpress multisite network where the main site which is an informative portal about the Langhe region in Italy, and the subsites are websites of small local companies in the tourism and wine/food niche. As an additional service for those who build a website with us, I was thinking about giving them the possibility to use some ouf our portal's content (such as sights, events etc) on their website, in an automatic way. Not as an "SEO" plus, but more as a service for their current users/visitors base: so if you have a B&B you can have on your site an "events" section with curated content, or a section about thing to see (monuments, parks, museums, etc) in that area, so that your visitors can enjoy reading some content about the territory. I was wondering if, apart from NOT being benefical, it would be BAD from an SEO point of view... ie: if they could be actually penlized by google. Thanks 🙂 Best
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Enrico_Cassinelli0 -
Same product in different categories and duplicate content issues
Hi,I have some questions related to duplicate content on e-commerce websites. 1)If a single product goes to multiple categories (eg. A black elegant dress could be listed in two categories like "black dresses" and "elegant dresses") is it considered duplicate content even if the product url is unique? e.g www.website.com/black-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/elegant-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/black-elegant-dress unique url > this is the way my products urls look like Does google perceive this as duplicated content? The path to the content is only one, so it shouldn't be seen as duplicated content, though the product is repeated in different categories.This is the most important concern I actually have. It is a small thing but if I set this wrong all website would be affected and thus penalised, so I need to know how I can handle it. 2- I am using wordpress + woocommerce. The website is built with categories and subcategories. When I create a product in the product page backend is it advisable to select just the lowest subcategory or is it better to select both main category and subcategory in which the product belongs? I usually select the subcategory alone. Looking forward to your reply and suggestions. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cinzia091 -
Internal Duplicate Content - Classifieds (Panda)
I've been wondering for a while now, how Google treats internal duplicate content within classified sites. It's quite a big issue, with customers creating their ads twice.. I'd guess to avoid the price of renewing, or perhaps to put themselves back to the top of the results. Out of 10,000 pages crawled and tested, 250 (2.5%) were duplicate adverts. Similarly, in terms of the search results pages, where the site structure allows the same advert(s) to appear under several unique URLs. A prime example would be in this example. Notice, on this page we have already filtered down to 1 result, but the left hand side filters all return that same 1 advert. Using tools like Siteliner and Moz Analytics just highlights these as urgent high priority issues, but I've always been sceptical. On a large scale, would this count as Panda food in your opinion, or does Google understand the nature of classifieds is different, and treat it as such? Appreciate thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers1 -
Duplicate Content for Deep Pages
Hey guys, For deep, deep pages on a website, does duplicate content matter? The pages I'm talk about are image pages associated with products and will never rank in Google which doesn't concern me. What I'm interested to know though is whether the duplicate content would have an overall effect on the site as a whole? Thanks in advance Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao1 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
How to Best Establish Ownership when Content is Duplicated?
A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author? Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A. Will that work, or is there a better solution? This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Allie_Williams0 -
Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed. The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote. As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office. The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form. The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag. Manually changing the descriptions is not an option. Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"? Any other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0