ECommerce site - Duplicate pages problem.
-
We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages.
We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find.
-
Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate.
-
We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?.
General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome
-
-
Many thanks , you have been most helpful.
Yes, I see your point. I think we will have a look at implementing this on a couple of categories where we can monitor traffic and rankings . Then if it looks good, then will roll it out to the rest of the site.
Thank you.
Sarah
-
Essentially yes - pages 2+ of search just look "thin" to Google. They tend to have similar title tags, META descriptions, etc., and Google honestly isn't all that fond of indexing search pages in the first place (they don't want their search to land on your search). Those 2+ pages also don't tend to attract links or make a lot of sense for someone landing on them. By using META NOINDEX,FOLLOW, Google can crawl those searches to deeper pages, but the actually search pages don't dilute your overall site and search index.
Google's preferred method (or so they say) in 2012 is rel=prev/next, but I find that implementation can be much trickier than META NOINDEX. It's a difficult topic, and I honestly find that the ideal approach varies wildly from site to site. It's important to plan well, implement careful, and measure the results.
-
Hi Peter,
Many thanks for your answer. Very comprehensive and much appreciated There's certainly some good suggestions here.
Just quickly you mention about putting a NOINDEX FOLLOW on every page from 2 or 3 onwards.I take it , that's because later pages don't rank to well ?.
Is that the suggestion so the idea behind it that the link juice is being diluted to much. By Keeping only the first 2 pages say indexed etc, I would stand a better chance of ranking higher.
I will pass your suggestions on to my developer and see what we can come up from it. Will monitor and report back , hopefully with a sorted solutioin.
Once again , many thanks for sound advice.
Sarah.
-
Unfortunately, pagination + sorts gets ugly fast. Technically, the rel=prev/next tag should contain the sort parameter AND then you should canonical to the main pagination page. So, for example if you had a page like:
www.example.com/search.php?page=2&sort=asc
You should have tags like:
- Rel=Prev: http://www.example.com/search.php?page=1&sort=asc
- Rel=Next: http://www.example.com/search.php?page=3&sort=asc
- Canonical: http://www.example.com/search.php?page=2
In practice, it's incredibly hard to implement. So, you could do a couple of things:
(1) Block the sort_by parameter with Google Webmaster Tools parameter handling
(2) Use META NOINDEX, FOLLOW on all pages 2+ of search and sort URLs
I don't find Robots.txt works that well, in practice, and 800K blocked URLs can make Google jump. I'm actually confused by how Google is crawling the sorts at all (since they're form-driven). It looks like you put the sorts in your pagination links. Would it be possible to store any sorts in a cookie or session variable and not add those to links?
Given your current situation, and that Google has indexed thousands of sort URLs (from what I can see), I think the Google Webmaster Tools approach might be the safest. This is a complex problem, though, and you may need to consult someone.
-
Hi ,
In Answer to your point on to Question 2 , Currently the maximum number of pages we have is 4 pages plus a View All for a few of our products but most products are split on 2 pages plus a view all.
For the largest product example we have 83 products broken down as Page 1 to 4 has 20 products , page5 has 3 and View all - 83 products. rel Prev and rel Next are on the pages and View all has Nothing on it (Is that okay). The title tags are duplicated on the numerous pages , so I was going to add in page 2, 3, 4 etc to sort that.
I was going to increase the number of products per page to 30 , which would in effect put me down to 3 pages plus View all but more importantly , I thought I would also get stronger link value and less dilution hence better SEO .
The pages don't rank partially well at all well but on google speed test, I think we score 85/100 anyway , so from a speed point of view, it should'nt be a problem. Was just worried, that big changes like this could have a dramatic effect .
The url incase your interested is http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Scaffold_towers/266
Many thanks
Very much appreciated.
Sarah.
-
Hi ,
Many Thanks for your reply,
We do have pagination and sorts like listing products a-z , z-a , price low to high and high to low etc which all generate different urls but we have put in the robot.txt file for google not to spider them. See below .
Also from looking at WMT is says it has blocked886,996 url's in the past 90 days. Our site has approx 54,000 indexed pages.
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.price%20ASC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.price%20DESC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.title%20ASC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.title%20DESC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.distance%20ASC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.distance%20DESC
Disallow: */stealth:onAre you suggesting we do the Canonical the sorts aas well for saftey incase we have missed anything ?
Sarah
-
(1) DON'T canonical to the first page of results - Google definitely has issues with that. If you've got rel=prev/next in place, then I wouldn't canonical to "View All", either. They're kind of competing signals. You can use rel=prev/next with rel=canonical, but it's a bit complicated. Basically, it's for situations where you have pagination AND some other parameter, like a sort.
(2) If you increase it, just make sure it doesn't negatively impact users or load-times (might be worth A/B testing, honestly). Are you saying that you might end up with a URL like "?page=7" which basically doesn't exist because now you'll have less pages? I think you might be safer just letting that 404 and have Google recrawl the new structure. The odds of having any links to Page 7 of search results (inbound links, that is) are very low, and just letting those pages die off may be safer.
-
I think the best solution to get something properly done on your website, if you're displaying a page with 20 products (by default) and it has a complicated extension to see the next one ( domain.com/?abc=123etc#321 ) you have a significant problem that you should be concerned about more - whether it's domain.com/category/page/1/ and page/2/.
In theory, page/1/ and page/2/ (blog style) contain the same content as the home page (/1/ or /). Some practices are noindex,follow for any page [2-∞). You should definitely consider rel=canonical across the site though. It's essential. As well as rel="next" rel="prev".
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
-
Main Site and eCommerce Site URLs for SEO
My client currently has a main website on a url and an eCommerce site on a subdomain. The eCommerce site is currently not mobile friendly, has images that are too small and are problematic - and I believe it negates some of the SEO work we do for them. I had to turn off Google Shopping ads because the quality score was so low. That being said, they are rebuilding a shopping cart on a new platform that will be mobile friendly BUT the images are going to be tiny until they slowly replace images over several months. Would you keep the shopping cart on a subdomain, or make it part of the main website URL? Can it negatively impact the progress we have made on the main site SEO.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
How do I redirect old html pages to new site?
Im seeing in my Google search console some of my old html pages. I never redirecting them and now they get 404 errors. Below is my current htaccess file, how would I changed it so that any html page i.e. intercallsystems.com/index.html forwards to my new site intercallsystems.com ? I have about 5 html pages that I want to redirect. Thank you for the help! Rena Currently my htaccess says: BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | palila
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0 -
Why is it the crawler saying I have 9 Duplicate Page Titles?
Hi, I received my weekly web crawl and it is saying this: | 4 | Duplicate Page Content |
Technical SEO | | afrohairsolutions
| 22 | Missing Meta Description Tag |
| 9 | Duplicate Page Title |
| 1 | Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters) |
| 1 | Title Element Too Short |
| 1 | 301 (Permanent Redirect) | I'm new to SEO and don't know how to fix this, I don't really see how I have Duplicate Page Content or Duplicate Page Title. This is my website: afrohairsolutions.co.uk Thank you in advance.0 -
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Please advise.
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Are there any other precautions I should be taking? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Question about duplicate images used within a single site
I understand that using duplicate images across many websites was become an increasingly important duplicate content issue to be aware of. We have a couple dozen geotargeted landing pages on our site that are designed to promote our services to residents from various locations in our area. We've created 400+ word pieces of fresh, original content for each page, some of which talks about the specific region in some detail. However, we have a powerful list of top reasons to choose us that we'd like to use on each page as is, without rewriting them for each page. We'd like to simply present this bulleted list as an image file on each page to get around any duplicate written copy concerns. This image would not appear on any other websites but would appear on about two dozen landing pages for a single site. Is there anything to worry about this strategy from a duplicate content or duplicate image perspective in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Can dynamically translated pages hurt a site?
Hi all...looking for some insight pls...i have a site we have worked very hard on to get ranked well and it is doing well in search. The site has about 1000 pages and climbing and has about 50 of those pages in translated pages and are static pages with unique urls. I have had no problems here with duplicate content and that sort of thing and all pages were manually translated so no translation issues. We have been looking at software that can dynamically translate the complete site into a handfull of languages...lets say about 5. My problem here is these pages get produced dynamically and i have concerns that google will take issue with this aswell as the huge sudden influx of new urls....as now we could be looking at and increase of 5000 new urls. (which usually triggers an alarm) My feeling is that it could be risking the stability of the site that we have worked so hard for and maybe just stick with the already translated static pages. I am sure the process could be fine but fear a manual inspection and a slap on the wrist for having dynamically created content?? and also just risk a review trigger period. These days it is hard to know what could get you in "trouble" and my gut says keep it simple and as is and dont shake it up?? Am i being overly concerned? Would love to here from others who have tried similar changes and also those who have not due to similar "fear" thanks
Technical SEO | | nomad-2023230 -
Duplicate Page Warnings, hkey and repetitive URLs
Hi, we just put our association's site in SEO Moz so we can tackle SEO and we received thousands of duplicate page content and duplicate title warnings. I searched the forum before asking 🙂 Appreciate some guidance on how many things are wrong with the URL's below that are getting flagged as duplicate page content. 1. Does the repetition of the page title and section hurt SEO? 2. Does the iMIS15 in the URL (the server) detract from relevant ranking? 3. From the forum, it looks like canonical tags should be added to the version of the page that starts with .....?hkey (is there a way to predict and "canonize" these? Or recommendations?) http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx?hkey=6d821afa-e3aa-4bef-bafa-2453238d12c6 http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx Thank you.
Technical SEO | | lyndas0 -
Internal Links on eCommerce sites
I have been working on an eCommerce site; www.pretavoir.co.uk over the past year. Improvements in SERPs have been good with many top three positions. However, there are other important keywords of similar difficulty which refuse to behave in a similar way.... The site is PR4 and has a homepage PA 52. The homepage includes links to internal brand pages eg Prada, Gucci etc. Q Would it be worthwhile creating footer anchor text with eaxct text eg Prada sunglasses, Gucci Sunglasses?? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0