We've had some shuffling for a keyword in the SERP results over last few days! Anyone else seeing their rankings bounce all over? It's only affecting one keyword that was previously a stable performer - this has occurred for the last few weeks (with no major changes to the page). Would be keen to hear your thoughts!

The purpose of the canonical tag is to tell Google which page to index first. So, on that note, I usually use the canonical tag on the strongest page in terms of pagerank, as this shows which page is linked to the best.

I'm also guessing you're using a framwork/platform like Magento, this can make linking quite difficult. I often suggest creating Brand pages, and link to the product page, the "3rd URL", from there. Brand pages also great for SEO, as most people search for brands first. Great place to get some fat head keywords in.

Also, make sure you put in the http:// as well, I think it is good practice to put in the full URL.

I just want to confirm something about duplicate content.

On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content?

Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page.

If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products...

Cheers,

We've had some shuffling for a keyword in the SERP results over last few days! Anyone else seeing their rankings bounce all over? It's only affecting one keyword that was previously a stable performer - this has occurred for the last few weeks (with no major changes to the page). Would be keen to hear your thoughts!