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
-
Reducing multi-page website to one page & SEO ramifications?
Hello there! I just want to check in before I do this. I am reducing a multi-page website to one page (temporarily, but for at least 4-6 months). I will be 301 redirecting all old pages to the one, new home page. The new home page has a lot more content, long and short keyword phrases. Aside from losing the benefit of internal links, will reducing the number of website pages hurt a ranking? Does having associated keywords on other website pages provide benefit to another (in this case Home) page? Thanks so much for your invaluable advice!
On-Page Optimization | | lulu710 -
Nofollow links to own website pages
To preserve link juice should I "nofollow" links to about us and contact us pages that appear at the top of our navigation? I read this article - but I am not familiar with the authenticity: http://www.eminentseo.com/blog/navigation-menu-optimization-best-practices/ Thanks Mike
On-Page Optimization | | henandstag0 -
Moving from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce on WP. Should we redirect size pages into one page?
We are moving from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce on WP. On Bigcommerce, due to some bizarre reasoning the previous developer had 3 separate URLS for the same product in different sizes - S, M and L. Now we plan to have one product page where the sizes can be selected and 301 redirect the 3 urls to the new one. Is this advisable? Or should we just have 3 separate pages. OR should we have one of the sizes pages as the new page and then redirect the other 2 to this one? I ask this because the site has a LOT of ranking power and we do not want to jeopardise that.
On-Page Optimization | | MashBonigala0 -
Is there any decent web browser that still displays the full page title at the top of the page?
I just updated to the latest version of Firefox on my Mac and saw that they now hide most of the page title in the browser tab, like Chrome and Safari. I like to be able to see the full page title at all times (for reasons I'm sure you all understand) and that's pretty much the only reason I stuck with Firefox all these years. Now I'm looking for an alternative – any suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | matt-145671 -
Internal and Link Juice Analysis - Too Many Links Error
Howdy! I have an analysis question related to internal links/link juice. Here is the general link set up of our site: 1. All Site Pages (Including Home Page): We have drop down "mega" menus in the header of everypage linking to various sub-categories on the site. So, because of this, in our header, we have a few hundred links to various pages on our site and these show up on every page of the site. 2. Product Pages: Header pages as mentioned above, but on top of that, we list out the keywords for that particular product and each keyword is linked back to our search results pages for that particular keyword. In General Moz is telling us we are having between 200-300 links on each product page. Currently, our Search Results pages are ranking higher and showing up in search more than our actual product pages. So, based on the above info, here are some thoughts: 1. Should we ajax in the Header links so that they aren't showing up for the search engines? Or, should we ajax them in only on all pages that are not the Home Page? 2. Should we get rid of the keyword links back to the Search Results pages that are on the product pages? What effect would these changes "actually" have? Does this just improve crawling? Or are there other positive results that would come of changes like these? We have hundreds of thousands of products, so if we were to make changes like these, could we experience negative results? Thanks for your help! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
Duplicate page content errors
Site just crawled and report shows many duplicate pages but doesn't tell me which ones are dups of each other. For you experienced duplicate page experts, do you have a subscription with copyscape and pay $.05 per test? What is the best way to clear these? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | joemas990 -
SEO value of "in the news" links on home page?
Notice more sites have an "in the News" section on the home page, or something similar like press releases... Apart from providing users fresh content, is there an SEO value to this? What is the explanation for this? Have a feeling the answer is obvious but just not too sure Thanks a lot.
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5