Duplicate Content Due to Pagination
-
Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss. While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful...
Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages.
I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform.
Thank you for taking the time to read my question!
-
Will do, thanks Matt. We have quite a bit in this new design, so we are staying with the platform. BC is great as far as uptime, etc. We actually left Volusion after 6 years to move here.
-
Did you invest much into the new design? If so, it might be too late to consider moving platforms. Service levels like that belong in the 1900's!!!
I'd recommend giving Madwire Media a shout if they developed it for you. They MIGHT be able to help. Feel free to pop them my email address if they get lost, I could be of some help possibly.
-
Thank you Matt!
They (BC) are not a ton of help and there seems to be multiple issues. The last two techs, no joke, have said "listen, if I were an SEO expert I wouldn't be sitting here"... what kind of service is that?
I am going to talk to the developer that built the site (Madwire Media) and see what they can do, if anything.
-
Ah, sounds like that could be an issue. Unfortunately I'm not too familiar with Big Commerce. I have used it a couple of times but not in detail. I tend to use Magento or OSCommerce for large eCommerce projects and sometimes Wordpress (using something like WooCommerce) for smaller projects.
It's definitely worth shouting up to Big Commerce though to see if they can help.
-
This article makes complete sense Matt. I don't have the ability, that I'm aware of, to edit the canonical tags used by Big Commerce. They automatically generate those for all products and categories. Funny as it seems, they do NOT have the canonical tag in the home page which is a separate can of worms I am dealing with.
-
I will read all of those articles. I do know, based on some other issues we're having, that the things I may have access to edit in BigCommerce are limited. Hopefully these articles have some information I can use.
-
Here are some great articles offering several different solutions to your problem -
http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience
-
This should help you out Josh:
You need to set up pagination correctly.
Alternatively, altering how many products are on the page might help but don't do this if you think it might effect your customers experience (although unlikely).
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
-
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Who gets punished for duplicate content?
What happens if two domains have duplicate content? Do both domains get punished for it, or just one? If so, which one?
Technical SEO | | Tobii-Dynavox0 -
WordPress Duplicate Content Caused By Categories
Hello, We have a wordpress blog that has around 250 categories. Due to our platform we have a hierarchy structure for 3 separate stores. For example iPhone > Apps > Books. Placing a blog post in the books category automatically places it into iPhone and iPhone/Apps category, causing 3 instances of any blog post in this category. Is this an issue? I have seen 2 schools of thought on categories, 1 index follow and 2 noindex follow. I know some of our categories get indexed, but with so many, maybe it is better to noindex them. We also considered reducing our categories to 10 to 12 and use tags to provide the indexed site navigation as follows: Reviews (category) iPhone Book App, iPhone App Store (tags) but this seems a little redundant? Anyone want to take this on? thank you Mike
Technical SEO | | crazymikesapps10 -
Index.php duplicate content
Hi, new here. Im looking for some help with htaccess file. index.php is showing duplicate content errors with: mysite.com/index.php mysite.com/ mysite.com ive managed to use the following code to remove the www part of the url: IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Technical SEO | | klsdnflksdnvl
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] but how can i redirect the mysite.com/index.php and mysite.com/ to mysite.com. Please help0 -
Duplicate video content question
This is really two questions in one. 1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content? 2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content? Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick1 -
An odd duplicate content issue...
Hi all, my developers have just assured me that nothing has changed form last week but in the today's crawl I see all the website duplicated: and the difference on the url is the '/' so basically the duplicated urls are: htts://blabla.bla/crop htts://blabla.bla/crop/ Any help in understanding why is much appreciated. thanks
Technical SEO | | LeadGenerator0 -
Url rewrites / shortcuts - Are they considered duplicate content?
When creating a url rewrite or shortcut, does this create duplicate content issues? split your rankings / authority with google/search engines? Scenario 1 wwwlwhatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/dqotd/ -> www.whatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/08/12/2012/deep-questions-of-the-day.html Scenario 2 bitly.com/hbb -> www.whatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/08/12/2012/deep-questions-of-the-day.html (or to make it more compicated...directs to the above mentioned scenario 1 url rewrite) www.whatthehellisahoneybooboo.com/dqotd/ *note well- there's no server side access so mentions of optimizing .htacess are useless in this situation. To be clear, I'm only referring to rewrites, not redirects...just trying to understand the implications of rewrites. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | seosquared0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0