Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?
-
We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site.
Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category.
This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product.
So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content?
Is this the best way?
-
Site is still in testing but as an example the products are for cars and the same product can fit multiple cars, hence why it may be in more than one place
-
Short answer: using rel="canonical" to point to the default URL for each product will solve the product-related duplicate content issue.
As for the "best" way to solve this problem, I actually prefer using a robots meta tag with "noindex, follow" attributes on each duplicate product page.
Since the duplicate URLs only exist for navigational purposes, I'd prefer to keep them out of the search engine indexes altogether.
Once you have this issue squared away, be sure to read through these resources for other important eCommerce considerations:
-
Another option i thought of would be that the other pages I simply add a no index meta tag to so it only indexes the one url.
The reason I say this as from experience of how seomoz crawls sites and some pages which i know are not duplicate content yet i have had many pages for many sites get tagged for duplicate content simply because there isn't enough of a difference on the page.
The product pages wouldb e very much the same as really all that would be different is the breadcrumb trail and possibly some other links 95% of the pages would be the same as they are the same product.
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
-
Multiple Markups on The Same Page - Best Solution?
Hi there! I have a website that is build in react javascript, and I'm trying to use markup on my pages. They are mostly articles about general topics with common questions (about the topic), and for most articles I would like to use two markups: article markup + FAQ Markup ( for the questions in the article) article markup + how-to markup Can I do this or will Google get confused? Since I have two @type at the same time, for example @type": "FAQPage" and "@type": "Article". How should I think? I'm using https://schema.dev/ right now. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leowa0 -
Best SEO Strategy for Badges & Awards.
Hello Moz Friends! I was wondering what the correct "SEO friendly" strategy is with badges and awards. We recently got BBB accredited and added their badge to the footer of the website. We also added a review badge from shopper approved to the footer. As I'm joining other communities, I see there's badges given to us. For example, Alignable. Great place for networking. They offer a badge that says "locals recommend us" or something. Should I embed these badges onto our website someplace? Should I create a page for just badges or place them in the footer or sidebar widgets? What the best SEO practice for this? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE2 -
Does having multiple Domain aliases hurt SEO rank ?
Our company having multiple domain aliases (DIfferent TLD) like example.com, .net, .org, .club, .win to one site (Same Content). We do this because our country ISP is blocking a few of the domain aliases. Question: Does this hurt the SEO rank? What approach is the best for us to gain SEO Rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | missionunpossible0 -
Ecommerce Site - Duplicate product descriptions & SKU pages
Hi I have a couple of questions regarding the best way to optimise SKU pages on a large ecommerce site. At the moment we have 2 landing pages per product - one is the primary landing page with no SKU, the other includes the SKU in the URL so our sales people & customers can find it when using the search facility on the site. The SKU landing page has a canonical pointing to the primary page as they're duplicates. Is this the best way? Or is it better to have the one page with the SKU in the URL? Also, we have loads of products with the very similar product descriptions, I am working on trying to include a unique paragraph or few sentences on these to improve the content - how dangerous is the duplicate content within your own site? I know its best to have totally unique content, but it won't be possible on a site with thousands of products and a small team. At the moment I am trying to prioritise the products to update. Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
SEO time
I wanto to be in the top of the google search. I am usiing a lot of SEO tools but... I have done it during one month. Do I have to wait more?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlosZambrana0 -
Multiple Ecommerce sites, same products
We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it. We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics. 1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...) 2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Duplicate Content www vs. non-www and best practices
I have a customer who had prior help on his website and I noticed a 301 redirect in his .htaccess Rule for duplicate content removal : www.domain.com vs domain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnvoyWeb
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC] The result of this rule is that i type MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com in the browser and it redirects to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com I wonder if this is causing issues in SERPS. If I have some inbound links pointing to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some pointing to MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, I would think that this rewrite isn't necessary as it would seem that Googlebot is smart enough to know that these aren't two sites. -----Can you comment on whether this is a best practice for all domains?
-----I've run a report for backlinks. If my thought is true that there are some pointing to www.www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some to the www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, is there any value in addressing this?0 -
What is the best way to embed PDF documents for SEO?
I have been using SCRIBD to embed PDF documents on my site but until recently I did not include the link back to SCRIBD. Will my site get credit for this content or will it go to SCRIBD? Is there a better way to embed PDF documents for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340