I have a question about on page links or duplicate contant
-
Ok help me out here friends.
I’m working with the warnings and errors for my site.
I have two problems that relate to each other and I want to know if you had to choose what problem what would you choose.
I’m running into some duplicate content and title errors because under categories for my products there are so many products that it creates more than one page and with each new page it has the same title or same content on the page.
I tried to make this less in some cases by showing more products per page like 100 items and in most cases per category it will only show one page now.
Now some times there’s still more than one page and also this creates too many links now on that category page.
So I think I can get rid of all the to many on page links but it will make more pages and duplicate content and title tag.
What would you guys do?
-
Thanks Cyrus I will take a look at these articles .
-
Ken, this is a really common problem with lots of eCommerce sites today. The problem is lots and lots of category pages with duplicate content/title tags.
First of all, consider what is best for your user. Is 100 products per page the best solution? You might need to test different scenarios to find out.
Second, how best to structure your category pages for maximum SEO benefit? The typical problems are:
- Pagination. Category - Page 2 often looks the same as Category Page 1.
- If the same products are in multiple categories, the categories themselves become near duplication.
The first solution is to make sure your products are properly categorized. If the same product is in 16 different categories, you might want to revisit that.
The second important step is to manage pagination. Adam Audette wrote a great article on Search Engine Land which covers the major pagination issues. It's well worth a read:
http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284
Also, you may want to study how SEOmoz handles it's category pages. For example, consider Page 2 of the "Search Engine Trends" Category. Notice the title tag, meta robots tag, and use (or not) of the canonical tag.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Hi Ken,
I'd actually worry less about the number of links on the page and try to address the duplicate content/title tag issues.
In reality, it's very common and sometimes necessary for websites, especially eCommerce websites, to have more than 100/links per page. See this post from Dr. Pete.
-
Thank for the reply.
So far I’m thinking its best to make the changes to get the links down fewer than 100 even if it creates more category pages and duplicate content.
My site is not word press it’s a shopping cart ecommerce web site.
It does have some chooses for seo urls and such. I will look at that to see if there’s a way to have the extra pages created by to many products be different from each other.
Just to be clear if category A has 100 products and I list 20 per page it makes a page 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and each page it makes has the same description and title tag. So that makes the duplicate content.
If I add more products per page it makes less pages sometimes only one but then I have more than 100 links per page.
So what’s better duplicate content or to many links?
Thanks Ken
-
Hi Ken,
This is an overarching issue with lots of sites which sell several products in each catagory.
Expertlaunch has some good ideas for you to run with.
You may also give some thought into using:
<meta < span="">name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> on the duplicate content pages . It will help the remaining pages in the SERPS. </meta <>
I read this tip in a thread a while back and it worked! Here is the thread below EGOL mentioned it. He seems to provide high quality feedback which has helped me in the past.
-
Ken,
Please allow me to address each item separately.
Number of links on each page - from my general studies and experience seo, I refrain from using more than 100 links on each page. This is done because Google may view your linking as spammy and may hurt your overall search rankings.
Categories - Make sure that you avoid over-using the same keyword in your categories as this can cause serious issues with Google where it can view such method as keyword stuffing. This can also cause problems down the road with diluting the value of your targeted keywords.
With CRM software like Wordpress, you are able to change your permalink structure via the Permalinks tab. Check your CRM software to see if you are able to customize the link structures to avoid running into this issue.
One important note, when working with a new site it's always a best practice to analyze your keywords and to plan out a map of your site with all pages and urls planned out. This will help you to avoid problems down the road.
I am working on a site right now that had poor categorization and now it is quite a challenge to restructure the links into new categories as this will most often break links which can set you back in terms of seo effort.
Whenever forwarding links always keep in mind that you must always use a proper 301 permanent redirect whenever changing links.
Also you may wish update your sitemap file and submit your site to Google Webmaster.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Which page will rank higher, my main article or the sub article linking from it?
Hi all, Can you help me figure this one out? I'm currently creating content for my website and I very badly want to know which page will rank higher in Google, my main article that has some keywords that are and links to my sub-article, or my sub-article which is optimized for those keywords? I will demonstrate with an example since I'm not sure my question is clear: If I have an article that talks about different kinds of candy and it links to a sub-article that will elaborate on specific candies like a mint candy ,which page will rank for mint candies. Until today I believed that if my sub-article which is linked from my main-article will rank for mint candies since it gets the support from my main article.Lately when experimenting this I found my thoughts to be wrong. Can anyone help me with this one?Any insights? Thanks, Leebi
On-Page Optimization | | Leebi0 -
Duplicate page content
Hi Crawl errors is showing 2 pages of duplicate content for my clients WordPress site: /news/ & /category/featured/ Yoast is installed so how best to resolve this ? i see that both pages are canonicalised to themselves so presume just need to change the canonical tag on /category/featured/ to reference /news/ ?(since news is the page with higher authority and the main page for showing this info) or is there other way in Yoast or WP to deal with this & prevent from happening again ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is it better to create more pages of content or expand on current pages of content?
I am assuming that one way of improving the rankings of current pages will be to create more content on the keywords used... should this be an expansion of the content on current pages I am optimising for a keyword or is it better to keep creating new pages and if we are creating new pages is it best to use an extension of the keyword on the new page – for example if we are optimising one page for ‘does voltage optimisation work’ would it then be worth creating a page optimised for ‘does voltage optimisation work in hotels’ for example and so on? I am guessing maybe both might help, this is just a question I have had from one of my clients.
On-Page Optimization | | TWSI1 -
Old web pages with link juice - still live, but not in nav tree
We have monthly newsletters posted on our website. We want to keep only 2 years (2013-2014) posted - http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/newsletter. All of the newsletters from 2011 and 2012 have good link juice, though. They are still live on the site - http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/newsletter/december-2012 - but they are not listed on the main Newsletter page, so you would need the direct URL to find it. Will Google punish us for this? Is this a good way to keep our link juice? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | nuxeo0 -
Which pages should use rel="canonical" links?
I have many pages showing up as multiple content. Most of the them belong to product pages for my store, login pages that show up everywhere on the site, etc. I know that I need to use the rel=canonical link in the header but after searching the forum I'm still unsure of what pages need it. Is it the pages that I don't want searched/crawled by Google or the other way around? Thanks! Crystal
On-Page Optimization | | COfashionista0 -
Optimally, how many times should the key word or phrase you are targeting for a particular page be mentioned or appear on that page?
Our marketing team is debating how many times the key phrase on each of our web store's product pages should include the word/phrase we are trying to be competitive with. Can you advise?
On-Page Optimization | | Glynlyon0 -
Duplicate Page Content Issue
For one of our campaigns, we have 164 errors for Duplicate Page Content. We have a website where much of the same content lives in two different places on their website. The information needs to be accessible from both areas. What is the best way to tackle this problem? Is there anything that can be done so these pages are not competing against one another? If the only solution is to edit the content on one of the pages, how much of the content has to be different? Is there a certain percentage to go by? Here is an example of what I am referring to: 1.) http://www.valleyorthopedicassociates.com/services/foot-center/preventing-sprains-and-strains 2.) http://www.valleyorthopedicassociates.com/patient-resources/service/foot-and-ankle-center/preventing-sprains-and-strains
On-Page Optimization | | cmaseattle1 -
Best Way to check for duplicate pages
With Google's updates we know they want to clean out duplicate content. i have been seeing the same crap spit out even word for word on different sites. Anyway how do you experienced SEO people test for dups on your own site as well as other sites. The only thing i can come up with is paying copyscape 5 cts a test. There has to be other ways. Advise/
On-Page Optimization | | joemas990