Is this duplicate content that I should be worried about?
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Our product descriptions appear in two places and on one page they appear twice.
The best way to illustrate that would be to link you to a search results page that features one product.
My duplicate content concern refers to the following,
- When the customer clicks the product a pop-up is displayed that features the product description (first showing of content)
- When the customer clicks the 'VIEW PRODUCT' button the product description is shown below the buy buytton (second showing of content), this is to do with the template of the page and is why it is also shown in the pop-up. This product description is then also repeated further down in the tabs (third showing of content).
My thoughts are that point 1 doesn't matter as the content isn't being shown from a dedicated URL and it relies on javascript. With regards to point 2, is the fact the same paragraph appears on the page twice a massive issue and a duplicate content problem?
Thanks
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From a UX point of view, it's a little deceiving that the link says 'Full Description', but then it's not any longer than the snippet up by the button. This could have a minor impact on SEO. I'd either shorten the snippet, or expand the description below in the tab. Overall though, from an SEO perspective, this isn't much different than you'd see on Amazon where they have the bulleted list up top, then a written out description below.
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Hi Logan
First off, thanks for your reply. That all makes sense. I'll get on and change my robots.txt file too.
With regards to my point 2 which refers to the product page (example page here) you can see the same description appears next to the product image but also below within the description tab. Is this anything to worry about? Is the fact the same text content appears twice on the same page bad?
Thanks
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Hi Joe,
It's pretty what you've got going on here with the light box 'quick view'. You're exactly right with this statement: "My thoughts are that point 1 doesn't matter as the content isn't being shown from a dedicated URL and it relies on javascript." Not so much the JS part (Google can and will crawl JS), but the dedicated URL part.
As an extra precaution, I'd recommend block your search URLs from crawling via robots.txt Add this line and you should be all set:
Disallow: /search*
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