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
-
Backup Server causing duplicate content flag?
Hi, Google is indexing pages from our backup server. Is this a duplicate content issue? There are essentially two versions of our entire domain indexed by Google. How do people typically handle this? Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Duplicating content from manufacturer for client site and using canonical reference.
We manage content for many clients in the same industry, and many of them wish to keep their customers on their individualized websites (understandably). In order to do this, we have duplicated content in part from the manufacturers' pages for several "models" on the client's sites. We have put in a Canonical reference at the start of the content directing back to the manufacturer's page where we duplicated some of the content. We have only done a handful of pages while we figure out the canonical reference potential issue. So, my questions are: Is this necessary? Does this hurt, help or not do anything SEO-wise for our ranking of the site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moz1admin1 -
Duplicate Multi-site Content, Duplicate URLs
We have 2 ecommerce sites that are 95% identical. Both sites carry the same 2000 products, and for the most part, have the identical product descriptions. They both have a lot of branded search, and a considerable amount of domain authority. We are in the process of changing out product descriptions so that they are unique. Certain categories of products rank better on one site than another. When we've deployed unique product descriptions on both sites, we've been able to get some double listings on Page 1 of the SERPs. The categories on the sites have different names, and our URL structure is www.domain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name.cfm. So even though the product names are the same, the URLs are different including the category names. We are in the process of flattening our URL structures, eliminating the category and subcategory names from the product URLs: www.domain.com/product-name.cfm. The upshot is that the product URLs will be the same. Is that going to cause us any ranking issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Duplicate Internal Content on E-Commerce Website
Hi, I find my e-commerce pharmacy website is full of little snippets of duplicate content. In particular: -delivery info widget repeated on all the product pages -product category information repeated product pages (e.g. all medicines belonging to a certain category of medicines have identical side effects and I also include a generic snippet of the condition the medicine treats) Do you think it will harm my rankings to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deelo5550 -
Is an RSS feed considered duplicate content?
I have a large client with satellite sites. The large site produces many news articles and they want to put an RSS feed on the satellite sites that will display the articles from the large site. My question is, will the rss feeds on the satellite sites be considered duplicate content? If yes, do you have a suggestion to utilize the data from the large site without being penalized? If no, do you have suggestions on what tags should be used on the satellite pages? EX: wrapped in tags? THANKS for the help. Darlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXeSEO0 -
Worldwide Stores - Duplicate Content Question
Hello, We recently added new store views for our primary domain for different countries. Our primary url: www.store.com Different Countries URLS: www.store.com/au www.store.com/uk www.store.com/nz www.store.com/es And so forth and so on. This resulted in an almost immediate rankings drop for several keywords which we feel is a result of duplicate content creation. We've thousands of pages on our primary site. We've assigned a "no follow" tags to all store views for now, and trying to roll back the changes we did. However, we've seen some stores launching in different countries with same content, but with a country specific extensions like .co.uk, .co.nz., .com.au. At this point, it appears we have three choices: 1. Remove/Change duplicate content in country specific urls/store views. 2. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au with duplicate content for now. 3. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au etc with fresh content for all stores. Please keep in mind, option 1, and 3 can get very expensive keeping hundreds of products in untested territories. Ideally, we would like test first and then scale. However, we'd like to avoid any duplicate penalties on our main domain. Thanks for your help and answers on the same.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globaleyeglasses0 -
BEING PROACTIVE ABOUT CONTENT DUPLICATION...
So we all know that duplicate content is bad for SEO. I was just thinking... Whenever I post new content to a blog, website page etc...there should be something I should be able to do to tell Google (in fact all search engines) that I just created and posted this content to the web... that I am the original source .... so if anyone else copies it they get penalised and not me... Would appreciate your answers... 🙂 regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopGearMedia0 -
Duplicate Content from Article Directories
I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link: Google always give the response none. My client has a blog and many articles on the blog. However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content. Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none? Is there something to correct the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen0