Page quantity vs no crawl errors.
-
Which one is better:
-
Have a ton of pages but accept crawl errors or;
-
Have a lot less pages with no crawl errors.
Let's say I have a product catalogue with 10 regular pages and 500 product pages (same page with content and title defined by url parameter like 'id').
It seems that even with a different product name, product description, price, color etc, I get dupplicate content crawl errors. I also know I could use a link tag with cannonical rel attribute to fix the crawl errors but I would lose indexing on 499 pages.
In this case is it better SEO wise to have:
-
510 pages with 499 dupplicate content crawl errors or;
-
11 pages with 0 crawl errors?
-
-
Hi Vincent,
Great question! The reason you are getting those duplicate content errors is because of the HTML similarity of your product pages. Even though they have different title tags and content, there's not enough content differences from one page to another to fully distinguish them.
That said, Google is a bit more sophisticated at determining duplicate content, but in the age of Panda, they might view the content on these pages as "thin" In general, it's nice to have at least 250+ words of rich unique content on every page you are trying to rank for.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
In general, you don't want to canonicalize those product pages, as these would effectively drop them from the index. Instead, the ideal solution would be to add more content to those pages, above the fold, and beef up the descriptions. Even if this is unreasonable, I would prefer the duplicate content errors in this scenario than canonicalizing everything to 10 pages.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!
-
I don't see why you would need those as the question was general and the example was not taken from a website. I guess the problem would apply to both:
and
-
Can you list your site domain?
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
-
Data that shows people who click on paid vs organic listings
Hey Everyone, I've been searching for data on the percentage of people who click on paid vs organic. My last stats which are now outdated show 60% of the people click on organic on average and 40% click on paid. Any help/links would be greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | JohnSammon0 -
The same page ranking twice in the top 10?
Whilst doing a SERP analysis for a particular phrase, i noticed that the same page is ranking twice in the top 10. I've known of the same domain ranking twice with different pages which makes sense but to see the exact same URL ranking twice is a new one for me. Has anyone seen this before too and know of reasons why this would happen?
Competitive Research | | jamiemonteathaegon0 -
Thoughts on Nofollow My Account / Shopping Cart Pages on an eCommerce Website
I recently noticed most of my competitors (eCommerce sites) have linked to pages within their sites that do not always contain product information (my account, shopping cart, etc) using rel="nofollow". My site does not currently do this. Are there any advantages to using rel="nofollow" on similar pages on our site? Any disadvantages?
Competitive Research | | Gordian0 -
How can I boost page rank rather quickly
I have had a site for 10+ years and recently decided to really put a lot of effort into boosting its page rank. In the last 2 months, I have 1. participated in forums 2. gotten a number of reasonably high ranking websites in my industry to link to my page i.e. creating 100's of external, do-follow back-links 3. created some external websites which are subject matter specific to my industry that are pointing back to my website. At this point, these sites do not have much in the way of page authority So far, my sites Alexa ranking has increased considerably from a rank of ~20M to ~1.7M worldwide. How do I go about increasing my page rank / mozRank equally as quickly? Having done a campaign of the competition, I noticed that most of their links are internal i.e. 750k+ which is nothing more than noise because they are not offering anymore information/products that we're offering. Moreover, we have duplicated all of their external links and then some. Finally, they have created a number of 'feeder' sites that all point back to them each with a page rank of 4. This is were they are obtaining the bulk of their 20k+ external links. What do you suggest that I do that I have not done already?
Competitive Research | | thelearningman0 -
.biz vs .com
searching for a domain for a new branch of business, the original .com domain was no longer available yet the same domain with a .biz was. Question, how does google treat and rank .biz vs .com, same? less?
Competitive Research | | AmazingUniverse560 -
Page Linking Root Domains vs Root Domain Linking Root Domains
Hi all, I am new on seomoz and I am not getting which is the difference between "Page Linking Root Domains" and "Root Domain Linking Root Domains". Could anyone please give me a clear explanation? An example would be excellent. Thank you Christine.
Competitive Research | | Cristina-Candin0 -
Link to landing page or home page
Ok, so I've been doing a bit of link research and found that most of our competitors use anchor text to link to their homepage on their site and not a specific landing page. Our current strategy is to link to the correct landing page depending on the anchor to get these to rank, as opposed to getting our homepage to rank for different keywords. If that makes sense. The main reason I can think of to send all links to the homepage is that it would increase the domain authority of the site as a whole. Instead of spreading the links to certain pages depending on the anchor text. It would also give your one page a greater chance to rank for all keywords? Quick example I am a site that sells sports clothes. I have 2 main pages from my homepage: Homepage Football Rugby _Should I link to the football page for all links anchored with "football", and all linked anchored with "rugby" to the rugby page OR should I anchor all links including "rugby" and "football" to the homepage? _ What do you think is the best strategy? Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | esendex0 -
How many Page Rank 8 sites are there?
Anyone have any estimate of how many Page Rank 8 sites are out there? Best, Steve
Competitive Research | | Aggie0