Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce
-
Hi,
My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles -
The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are
Products Map :: Company Name
How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it?
Thanks.
-
That's what I'd do. Just make sure to set up a 301 redirect from all of those pages to the homepage, so you don't lose any visitors with the change.
-
Kristina,
thanks for continuing input-
We have an XML site map- Knowing that combined with what you said- It seems that the answer is to just take that products_map.php off the site?
Thanks again!!
-
Hi Frank,
I would change the page titles to:
Tommeys Mardi Gras | [letter] | [page #]
For example, http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=4's page title would be:
Tommeys Mardi Gras | C | 4
That'll at least make them different, and show the structure of your site better. Generally, you want the page title first, then the brand, but since most people aren't going to search for the letter C, I put those last.
But, in general, it's probably better not to have massive indexes like this on your site. The category pages are much better for search engine optimization, and when you have both category pages and alphabetical lists, you're duplicating that content.
-
Kristina,
Thanks for the reply- Here are some of the links that are showing as errors for duplicate page titles.
http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=M&page=5
http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=Y
http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=4
http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=2
Plus many more..
They all have the page title: Products Map :: Toomey's Mardi Gras
Looking forward to your advice.
Thank you!
Frank
-
Hi Frank,
I think that the link you shared is locked for you personally. Do you mind sharing your website URL so we can look it up in Open Site Explorer ourselves?
Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content per se, but it'll generally hurt your rankings:
- If your issue is that you have identical pages with different URLs, leading to duplicate page titles, your link building efforts are going to be split. Google will only rank one of your duplicate pages on its results page, and that page will be weaker because some backlinks go to the duplicate.
- If the issue is that you have different pages that happen to have the same title, both could rank, but the pages won't be easily distinguishable from each other on the results page. It's much better to have a unique page title so that searchers can see what they're going to get from your page.
Hope this helps,
Kristina
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
-
Pages with Duplicate Content
When I crawl my site through moz, it shows lots of Pages with Duplicate Content. The thing is all that pages are pagination pages. How should I solve this issue?
Technical SEO | | 100offdeal0 -
Duplicate Landing Pages showing up in search results
Hey Guys, I recently noticed that our Christmas Gifts landing page was ranking twice in the Google serps for the query "Christmas Gifts." One of these pages is an old url that has already been 301 redirected to the new url page which is also showing up in the search results. In the results, the following shows up in position 2 & 3 for the Christmas Gifts query: <cite class="_Rm">www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/christmas/christmas-gifts</cite> <cite class="_Rm">www.uncommongoods.com/occasions/christmas-gifts/christmas-gifts</cite>The url with "occasions" in it has already been 301 redirected to the url above it. Not sure why this is still showing up. I know it takes Google some time to index 301s and sometimes they show old urls, but it's been a few months since the old "occasions" url was redirected.The title tags for these pages are different but they are actually the same page. The new "gifts" version of the url was made live in the Navigation of our site just last week and before that it was hidden from our Navigation. Would this be the reason it's now showing up in search?Any ideas on why this might be happening? ThanksExplanations?
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
150+ Pages of URL Parameters - Mass Duplicate Content Issue?
Hi we run a large e-commerce site and while doing some checking through GWT we came across these URL parameters and are now wondering if we have a duplicate content issue. If so, we are wodnering what is the best way to fix them, is this a task with GWT or a Rel:Canonical task? Many of the urls are driven from the filters in our category pages and are coming up like this: page04%3Fpage04%3Fpage04%3Fpage04%3F (See the image for more). Does anyone know if these links are duplicate content and if so how should we handle them? Richard I7SKvHS
Technical SEO | | Richard-Kitmondo0 -
Duplicate pages or note? Variations just due to language changes?
I have some pages marked as duplicates, so I want to do what I can to solve the issues concerned. One issue concerns duplicates where the page content is indeed the same except for the language that the content is offered in. The URL for example of the documentation page of the site, in English is as follows:
Technical SEO | | PulseAnalytics
http://www.domain.com/support/documentation We then have the same content in German, French, Russian using the following URLs.
http://www.domain.com/de/support/documentation
http://www.domain.com/fr/support/documentation
http://www.domain.com/ru/support/documentation Each page has links to PDFs which are all in fact in English so the links to the docs are the same. Moz is flagging up all these pages as being duplicate content (which it is when translated back into English, but is not if you just consider that they are using completely different languages!) Has anyone any thoughts on how to solve this? Or is this something not to worry about / disregard? Many thanks Simon0 -
Google Displaying wrong URL but correct page title and description in SERPS
Hi. Our second highest performing page on Google is messed up in the SERPS. This is our login page. It always ranks high. It still does, but the URL is incorrect. Google is referencing an old redirect that was for a one off campaign from January 2014. This page has long been redirected. But now the vanity url for this page is what is displayed in Google. The link goes to our login page but once you log in it redirects you to a page saying the offer has expired instead of your account details. This is a huge issue for us. Can anyone shed some light? I'm having a rel canonical added since this page is used for a lot of vanity deeplinks.
Technical SEO | | PollyKane0 -
Duplicate Page Titles
I had an issue where I was getting duplicate page titles for my index file. The following URLs were being viewed as duplicates: www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/index.html www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/ I tried many solutions, and came across the rel="canonical". So i placed the the following in my index.html: I did a crawl, and it seemed to correct the duplicate content. Now I have a new message, and just want to verify if this is bad for search engines, or if it is normal. Please view the attached image. i9G89.png
Technical SEO | | pixel830 -
Duplicate Home Page content and title ... Fix with a 301?
Hello everybody, I have the following erros after my first crawl: Duplicate Page Content http://www.peruviansoul.com http://www.peruviansoul.com/ http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2 Duplicate Page title http://www.peruviansoul.com http://www.peruviansoul.com/ http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2 Do you think I could fix them redirecting to http://www.peruviansoul.com with a couple of 301 in the .htaccess file? Thank you all for you help. Gustavo
Technical SEO | | peruviansoul0 -
Is 100% duplicate content always duplicate?
Bit of a strange question here that would be keen on getting the opinions of others on. Let's say we have a web page which is 1000 lines line, pulling content from 5 websites (the content itself is duplicate, say rss headlines, for example). Obviously any content on it's own will be viewed by Google as being duplicate and so will suffer for it. However, given one of the ways duplicate content is considered is a page being x% the same as another page, be it your own site or someone elses. In the case of our duplicate page, while 100% of the content is duplicate, the page is no more than 20% identical to another page so would it technically be picked up as duplicate. Hope that makes sense? My reason for asking is I want to pull latest tweets, news and rss from leading sites onto a site I am developing. Obviously the site will have it's own content too but also want to pull in external.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0