How to deal with category browsing and duplicate content
-
On an ecommerce site there are typically a lot of pages that may appear to be duplications due to category browse results where the only difference may be the sorting by price or number of products per page.
How best to deal with this? Add nofollow to the sorting links? Set canonical values that ignore these variables? Set cononical values that match the category home page?
Is this even a possible problem with Panda or spiders in general?
-
Can Google deal with "search engine safe" parameters? I added our sort stuff to Webmaster tools but I'm not sure Google knows what to do and can't find any info on this.
-
That makes sense but should I be doing anything with rel canonical to make sure that each sort option doesn't display a different canonical url?
-
For Google, you can go into your Webmaster Tools, and go to the Site configuration > URL parameters page. You can set the parameters in your URLs to things like "Sorts", "Paginates", or "Narrows", so that Google will know how the parameter changes the info on the page. Once Google knows how the parameter effects the page, presumably they'll give the right links and display URLs in their search results.
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
-
Help: How to optimize my duplicate category pages
Hi all My category pages will showcase the same products how do I go about optimizing these pages so they don't show up as duplicate content? Would appreciate your all feedaback! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Base copy on 1 page, then adding a bit more for another page - potential duplicate content. What to do?
Hi all, We're creating a section for a client that is based on road trips - for example, New York to Toronto. We have a 3 day trip, a 5 day trip, a 7 day trip and a 10 day trip. The 3 day trip is the base, and then for the 5 day trip, we add another couple of stops, for the 7 day trip, we add a couple more stops and then for the 10 day trip, there might be two or three times the number of stops of the initial 3 day trip. However, the base content is similar - you start at New York, you finish in Toronto, you likely go through Niagara on all trips. It's not exact duplicate content, but it's similar content. I'm not sure how to look after it? The thoughts we have are:1) Use canonical tags 3,5,7 day trips to the 10 day trip.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalhothouse
2) It's not exactly duplicate content, so just go with the content as it is We don't want to get hit by any penalty for duplicate content so just want to work out what you guys think is the best way to go about this. Thanks in advance!0 -
Need help with huge spike in duplicate content and page title errors.
Hi Mozzers, I come asking for help. I've had a client who's reported a staggering increase in errors of over 18,000! The errors include duplicate content and page titles. I think I've found the culprit and it's the News & Events calender on the following page: http://www.newmanshs.wa.edu.au/news-events/events/07-2013 Essentially each day of the week is an individual link, and events stretching over a few days get reported as duplicate content. Do you have any ideas how to fix this issue? Any help is much appreciated. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bamcreative0 -
Joomla duplicate content
My website report says http://www.enigmacrea.com/diseno-grafico-portafolio-publicidad and http://www.enigmacrea.com/diseno-grafico-portafolio-publicidad?limitstart=0 Has the same content so I have duplicate pages the only problem is the ?limitstart=0 How can I fix this? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kuavicrea0 -
About robots.txt for resolve Duplicate content
I have a trouble with Duplicate content and title, i try to many way to resolve them but because of the web code so i am still in problem. I decide to use robots.txt to block contents that are duplicate. The first Question: How do i use command in robots.txt to block all of URL like this: http://vietnamfoodtour.com/foodcourses/Cooking-School/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | magician
http://vietnamfoodtour.com/foodcourses/Cooking-Class/ ....... User-agent: * Disallow: /foodcourses ( Is that right? ) And the parameter URL: h
ttp://vietnamfoodtour.com/?mod=vietnamfood&page=2
http://vietnamfoodtour.com/?mod=vietnamfood&page=3
http://vietnamfoodtour.com/?mod=vietnamfood&page=4 User-agent: * Disallow: /?mod=vietnamfood ( Is that right? i have folder contain module, could i use: disallow:/module/*) The 2nd question is: Which is the priority " robots.txt" or " meta robot"? If i use robots.txt to block URL, but in that URL my meta robot is "index, follow"0 -
How can I remove duplicate content & titles from my site?
Without knowing I created multiple URLs to the same page destinations on my website. My ranking is poor and I need to fix this problem quickly. My web host doesn't understand the problem!!! How can I use canonical tags? Can somebody help, please.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZoeAlexander0 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Duplicate Content On A Subdomain
Hi, We have a client who is currently close to completing a site specifically aimed at the UK market (they're doing this in-house so we've had no say in how it will work). The site will almost be a duplicate (in terms of content, targeted keywords etc.) of a section of the main site (that sits on the root domain) - the main site is targeted toward the US. The only difference will be certain spellings and currency type. If this new UK site were to sit on a sub domain of the main site, which is a .com, will this cause duplicate content issues? I know that there wouldn't be an issue if the new site were to be on a separate .co.uk domain (according to Matt Cutts), but it looks like the client wants it to be on a sub domain. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasarrow0