Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate Content | eBay
-
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform.
I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay?
Update:
I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical
So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content.
The question is now: should I add it or not?
UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting.
Anyone else have feedback?
-
Well,
I have client account examined here on MOZ. He's got huge duplicated content and it definitely sounds to me like it is duplicating the content from the site to Ebay.
I'll post back about that, but definitly something to consider. I guess if Google has to choose beetween a site and Ebay... it is going to be tough to fight for SERPS against Ebay.
-
eBay does not care about duplicate content unless copyright involves. Great image and great price is the ebay to sell on ebay.
-
Agree with Stephan here - eBay's extremely unlikely to give you control over the rel=canonical on their product pages, but generally, the content duplication by having the product info on their site shouldn't harm you.
If you're really worried, provide more detail/depth/content on your own site than what you do on eBay, and possibly consider having different title/product name conventions. There's lots of good ways to describe the same product.
-
You can have canonical from one domain to another.
I am talking about have the ability to actually control eBay's meta data at the canonical level. They already have canonical tags going back to their own pages and I doubt they would give you control over it. Again, I am not 100% sure but I would be shocked if they gave you control of that field. eBay has its own SEO concerns so I image they would retain control of that field.
I just don't consider a product page on eBay to be a duplicate of a product page on a third party site even if the site were feeding the data to eBay. Your site and eBay are 2 totally separate entities and I don't think these would be considered duplicate pages.
-
yea me too: Listening to Matt Cutts here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/ If you want to fast forward to: 1:30 and it seems to me that hes saying that you can have a canonical from what I understand: anywhere. Hearing that and wondering how the search engines REALLY interpret iframes ( as they want to read a site more like a human ) how will they handle the canonical.
Sure not 100% of the site actually us a duplicate but the main stuff is. It makes me wonder. I'll really know if I see a backlink from eBay in OSE.
( not saying that that is the goal but the content is ours and if the shoe was on the other foot and we getting penalized..) -
I am not sure you can control the canonical tag of an eBay page. I think eBay will have the main control... you can maybe add it to the iFrame but I think eBay's headers will be the ones that have dominance.
I also don't think having eBay product pages would be considered duplicate content. We have numerous product feeds going to third party shopping sites and I don't consider this to be duplicate content at all.
However, I am only slightly familiar with eBay. It will be interesting to see other answers on the subject.
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
-
How can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
Do I need to add the actual language for meta tags and description for different languages? cited for duplicate content for different language
Hi, I am fairly new to SEO and this community so pardon my questions. We recently launched on our drupal site mandarin language version for the entire site. And when i do the crawl site, i get duplicate content for the pages that are in mandarin. Is this a problem or can i ignore this? Should i make different page titles for the different languages? Also, for the metatag and descriptions, would it better in the native language for google to search for? thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lynetteboss0 -
Duplicate content due to parked domains
I have a main ecommerce website with unique content and decent back links. I had few domains parked on the main website as well specific product pages. These domains had some type in traffic. Some where exact product names. So main main website www.maindomain.com had domain1.com , domain2.com parked on it. Also had domian3.com parked on www.maindomain.com/product1. This caused lot of duplicate content issues. 12 months back, all the parked domains were changed to 301 redirects. I also added all the domains to google webmaster tools. Then removed main directory from google index. Now realize few of the additional domains are indexed and causing duplicate content. My question is what other steps can I take to avoid the duplicate content for my my website 1. Provide change of address in Google search console. Is there any downside in providing change of address pointing to a website? Also domains pointing to a specific url , cannot provide change of address 2. Provide a remove page from google index request in Google search console. It is temporary and last 6 months. Even if the pages are removed from Google index, would google still see them duplicates? 3. Ask google to fetch each url under other domains and submit to google index. This would hopefully remove the urls under domain1.com and doamin2.com eventually due to 301 redirects. 4. Add canonical urls for all pages in the main site. so google will eventually remove content from doman1 and domain2.com due to canonical links. This wil take time for google to update their index 5. Point these domains elsewhere to remove duplicate contents eventually. But it will take time for google to update their index with new non duplicate content. Which of these options are best best to my issue and which ones are potentially dangerous? I would rather not to point these domains elsewhere. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Trailing Slashes for Magento CMS pages - 2 URLS - Duplicate content
Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL. I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root. Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
How to resolve duplicate content issues when using Geo-targeted Subfolders to seperate US and CAN
A client of mine is about to launch into the USA market (currently only operating in Canada) and they are trying to find the best way to geo-target. We recommended they go with the geo-targeted subfolder approach (___.com and ___.com/ca). I'm looking for any ways to assist in not getting these pages flagged for duplicate content. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jyoung2220 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0