How do I avoid this issue of duplicate content with Google?
-
I have an ecommerce website which sells a product that has many different variations based on a vehicle’s make, model, and year. Currently, we sell this product on one page “www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001” and we show a modal to sort through each make, model, and year. This is important because based on the make, model, and year, we have different prices/configurations for each. For example, for the Jeep Wrangler and Jeep Cherokee, we might have different products:
Ultimate Pet Liner - Jeep Wrangler 2011-2013 - $350
Ultimate Pet Liner - Jeep Wrangler 2014 - 2015 - $350
Utlimate Pet Liner - Jeep Cherokee 2011-2015 - $400
Although the typical consumer might think we have 1 product (the Ultimate Pet Liner), we look at these as many different types of products, each with a different configuration and different variants.
We do NOT have unique content for each make, model, and year. We have the same content and images for each. When the customer selects their make, model, and year, we just search and replace the text to make it look like the make, model, and year. For example, when a custom selects 2015 Jeep Wrangler from the modal, we do a search and replace so the page will have the same url (www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001) but the product title will say “2015 Jeep Wrangler”.
Here’s my problem:
We want all of these individual products to have their own unique urls (cargoliner.com/products/2015-jeep-wrangler) so we can reference them in emails to customers and ideally we start creating unique content for them. Our only problem is that there will be hundreds of them and they don’t have unique content other than us switching in the product title and change of variants. Also, we don’t want our url www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001 to lose its link juice.
Here’s my question(s):
My assumption is that I should just keep my url: www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001 and be able to sort through the products on that page. Then I should go ahead and make individual urls for each of these products (i.e. cargoliner.com/products/2015-jeep-wrangler) but just add a “nofollow noindex” to the page.
Is this what I should do?
How secure is a “no-follow noindex” on a webpage? Does Google still index?
Am I at risk for duplicate content penalties?
Thanks!
-
Hi Don,
Using these generic blocks for multiple products is an awesome idea, but don't you think it'll end up creating almost duplicate content section on all these product pages?
Does bots consider duplicate content across the page, or section wise?
-
The only thing I'd add to this is to that nofollow isn't secure enough. I would recommend blocking the individual product pages that you don't want search engines to find. Thanks Donford for the detailed response.
Craig
-
Thanks for your response Don. I have a followup question for you.
I did understand your your t-shirt example but I think it's even more refined in our case. Since there are so many different variants, we do have to count them as different products, and we would like to avoid creating custom content right away (there's just so much we would have to create). I'm still thinking our perfect solution would be custom links but with a canonical tag pointing back to "www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001".
Here's my solution based on your advise:
I'm going to keep my main page where people can sort to find there make, model, and year (www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001).
Then I plan to have specific product pages per make, model, and year which will have duplicate content except for the make, model, and year searched and replaced. ie Jeep Wrangler 2015-2016 will be "www.cargoliner/products/jeep-wrangler-2015-2016" and in that page I will have a canonical tag point back to "www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001" so I don't get hit with duplicate content.
After this and over the next 6-9 months, I plan to fill in all of the custom content for each product. Then I plan to remove the canonical tag once I have custom content on that page.
Does this sound like the correct approach?
-
Hi Kirby,
What you have here is a common hurdle to many online businesses. Just like a company selling T-shirts, they may have a smiley face t-shirt in s, m, l, xl, xxl and in 5 different colors. So how does one optimize their content to be found when somebody searches for XL red smiley face t-shirt?
You can take one of two approaches.
Option 1: You can optimize a page for the "main item" in my example it would be "smiley face t-shirt". Then try to get the long tailed keywords on the page by listing colors, sizes, on the page a couple times. The goal of this page would be to rank #1 for the broad keyword Smiley Face T-Shirt, and high on longer keywords like XL Smiley Face T-Shirts, and Red Smiley Face T-shirt. With this approach you would use parameters for items, so you could generate a unique url, but you would canonical it back to the main page.
So the main page would look like this:
url: thetshirtShop.us/mens-tees/smilely-face-tshirt
Title: Smiley Face T-Shirt, Men's Small Through XL
H1: Men's Smiley Face T-Shirt, S,M,L,XL, 2XL, Select A Color & SizeThen for each option you would have your parameters (example red, XL)
url: thetshirtShop.us/mens-tees/smilely-face-tshirt?size=XL&color=red
Canonical: thetshirtShop.us/mens-tees/smiely-face-tshirtThat is the basic structure, but be sure in your content you include the color's and sizes at least twice so when the page is crawled the crawlers see the sizes and colors.
Option 2: which in my opinion is the better of the two would be to create unique content for each item. I know this may seem like it would be difficult or time consuming, and to a degree it is. Again how much different is a red t-shirt from a green one? Aside from the color not much, but there is opportunity here.
Example option 2 color red / xl
url: thetshirtShop.us/mens-tees/smilely-face-tshirt?size=XL&color=red
Title: Red Smiley Face T-Shirt Men's Size XL
H1: Men's Red Smilely Face T-Shirt Size XLContent Block (Smiley Face T)
By artist Harvest Ross Ball the smiley face t-shirt puts a smile on your chest and a positive attitude by on-lookers. Staying true to the original creator the smiley face tee has been digital optimized and transferred to the tee using our proprietary screen process that insures the image will last. This is one of best selling iconic tees and available in colors, yellow, red, black, white and green. Men's U.S standard sizes, small, medium, large, extra large, and extra extra large.Content Block (Color-Red):
The T-Shirt Shop using the finest natural dyes in creating our vibrant red color for {Smiley Face T-Shirt}. Using red hibiscus, sumac berries and beets. Our red color is formulated to last for thousands of washes with no fading or wash bleeding. The end result we get true red {Smiley Face T-Shirt} which is quality tested to be HEX #FF0000 RGB 255,0,0 +- within 2 shades.Content Block (Size XL):
Our Men's Size XL for our {Red} {Smiley Face T-Shirt} follows U.S sizing standards; width 24" (61 cm), length 31.25" (80cm). Sleeve length for the {Red} {Smiley Face T-Shirt} is 9" (22cm), and can accommodate up to a 16" (40cm) bicep comfortably. All our T's are pre-washed and pre-shrunk to ensure our high sizing standards are meet.Okay, so let me break down what I did here. I created 2 different "specific" code blocks with dynamic elements inside them noted by the { } brackets. Along with the original description block. You can reuse these blocks for other t-shirts, and still achieve a unique page. For example:
Smiley Face T (red/xl) Content Blocks = Smiley Face T, Red, XL
Smiley Face T (green/large) Content Blocks = Smiley Face T, Green, LargeUsing these code blocks with dynamic insertion of product details you can achieve a unique page. However you need to get creative in writing these blocks, and do some back end coding or extra work in getting them uploaded to the thousands of different products properly. Just to note I have no knowledge of t-shirts or how best to market them, I just used this for an example to help you identify possible areas of creativity in your product.
In summary I have laid out 2 options for this problem. You can use parameters with canonical and a single page, or get creative and make some unique content pages. Each option will achieve unique urls for your email campaign, and follow SEO best practices.
Hope this helps,
Don
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 Issue WWW and Non WWW
One of my sites got hit with duplicate content a while ago because Google seemed to be considering hhtp, https, www, and non ww versions of the site all different sites. We thought we fixed it, but for some reason https://www and just https:// are giving us duplicate content again. I can't seem to figure out why it keeps doing this. The url is https://bandsonabudget.com if any of you want to see if you can figure out why I am still having this issue.
Technical SEO | | Michael4g1 -
Minimising the effects of duplicate content
Hello, We realised that one of our clients, copied a large part of content from our website to his. The normal reaction would be to send a cease and desist letter. Nevertheless this would probably mean loosing a good client. The client dumped the text of several articles (for example:
Technical SEO | | Lvet
http://www.velascolawyers.com/en/property-law/136-the-ley-de-costas-coastal-law.html ) Into the same page:
http://www.freundlinger-partners.com/en/home/faqs-property-law/ I convinced the client to place our authorship tags on this page, but I am wondering if this is enough. What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
Duplicate content and rel canonicals?
Hi. I have a question relating to 2 sites that I manage with regards to duplicate content. These are 2 separate companies but the content is off a data base from the one(in other words the same). In terms of the rel canonical, how would we do this so that google does not penalise either site but can also have the content to crawl for both or is this just a dream?
Technical SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
My issue with duplicate content is this. There are two versions of my website showing up http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/ What are the best practices for fixing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital0 -
Need help with Joomla duplicate content issues
One of my campaigns is for a Joomla site (http://genesisstudios.com) and when my full crawl was done and I review the report, I have significant duplicate content issues. They seem to come from the automatic creation of /rss pages. For example: http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose is the page but the duplicate content shows up as http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose/rss It appears that Joomla creates feeds for every page automatically and I'm not sure how to address the problem they create. I have been chasing down duplicate content issues for some time and thought they were gone, but now I have about 40 more instances of this type. It also appears that even though there is a canonicalization plugin present and enabled, the crawl report shows 'false' for and rel= canonicalization tags Anyone got any ideas? Thanks so much... Scott | |
Technical SEO | | sdennison0 -
How to use internal tracking without causing duplicate content issues
Hi, We've been testing internal tracking for 4 weeks on a couple of pages using the basic string ?internalcampaign=X, but hese pages have started appearing in the search results. We don't currently have the facility to add canonical tags to correct this. Does anyone have any other solutions to this problem other than deleting the internal tracking or adding filters on the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NSJ780 -
Cross-domain duplicate content issue
Hey all, Just double-checking something. Here's the issue, briefly. One of my clients is a large law firm. The firm has a main site, and an additional site for an office in Atlanta. On the main site, there is a list of all attorneys and links to their profiles (that they wrote themselves). The Atlanta site has this as well, but lists only the attorneys located in that office. I would like to have the profiles for the Atlanta lawyers on both sites. Would rel=canonical work to avoid a dupe-content smackdown? The profiles should rank for Atlanta over the main site. This just means that G will drop the main site's profiles (for those attorneys) from their index, correct? No other weird side effects? I hope I worded all that clearly!
Technical SEO | | LCNetwork0 -
Duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
Good afternoon. I've tried searching for an answer to the following question but I believe my circumstance is a little different than what has been asked in the past. I currently run a Australian website targeted at a specific demographic (50-75) and we produce a LARGE number of articles on a wide variety of lifestyle segments. All of our focus up until now has been in Australia and our SEO and language is dedicated towards this. The next logical step in my mind is to launch a mirror website targeted at the US market. This website would be a simple mirror of a large number of articles (1000+) on subjects such as Food, Health, Travel, Money and Technology. Our current CMS has no problems in duplicating the specific items over and sharing everything, the problem is in the fact that we currently use a .com.au domain and the .com domain in unavailable and not for sale, which would mean we have to create a new name for the US targeted domain. The question is, how will mirroring this information, targeted towards US, affect us on Google and would we better off getting a large number of these articles 're-written' by a company on freelancer.com etc? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Geelong
Drew0