Duplicate page content & titles on the same domain
-
Hey,
My website: http://www.electromarket.co.uk is running Magento Enterprise.
The issue I'm running into is that the URLs can be shortened and modified to display different things on the website itself. Here's a few examples.
Product Page URL: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/studio-bedroom-monitors/bba0051
OR I could remove everything in the URL and just have: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 and the link will work just as well.
Now my problem is, these two URL's load the same page title, same content, same everything, because essentially they are the very same web page.
But how do I tell Google that? Do I need to tell Google that? And would I benefit by using a redirect for the shorter URLs?
Thanks!
-
Hi Allen,
Thanks for that! Really helpful. I'll look into it right away.
Tom
-
404 errors are definitely not what you want.
You loose any link juice that may have been established for that URL. I believe you should look into a free plug-in available for Magento. It can be found with the search term "Canonical". It is easy to use, and is designed specifically for this issue.
Bing, Yahoo, Google, all follow the Canonical directive, and will solve the link juice issue automatically.
We use a different shopping cart, but have implemented the "Canonical" tag in a slightly different way, with the same result.
If you have multiple pages, each with the complaint from a search engine that they have duplicate content, then you should try and look at the page and think why does the search engine consider this duplicate content. Perhaps you have the same template being used for each of the paginated results. This page then is a great candidate to be "Canonicalized".
Canonicalization does not hurt you search engine rankings, think of it like a downtown metro area. Will your business stand out more if you have two small downtown locations, or will it draw more attention if it is a single building that is twice as tall? When you Canonicalize a url the link juice flows from the duplicate page to the single page specified in the Canonical url.
-
Oh okay, so yeah a lot of 404's! Ha.
The website currently has ~4100 products including product packages (2x 1 speaker etc.)
What I had in mind was using electromarket.co.uk/product code as a URL redirector or forwarder.
It will be a long process and it's going to take a lot of patience I imagine. But for now, having duplicate content (in theory) on the same website, is that going to cause problems with Google? Will Google see that it's the same URL and not take action or will I be penalized for it? That's my main concern at the moment!
Tom
-
No probs.
No, Magento URL Rewrite Module will not do the 301's for a mass change like going from category paths to just product paths - so you will be left with a lot of 404's to clear up. The other thing is that your individual product URL's, have no keywords in them whatsoever, except presumably the SKU's - so I think changing it may affect you adversely.
How many products do you have? 1200 hits a day is not bad going...
-
Hi Ben,
Thanks for that! I shall look into it. I'm a bit wary about turning the category URL off as I am currently getting around 1200 unique hits a day and wouldn't want to jeopardise that by sending potential customers to a 404 page (all be it a soft 404).
I know that if I change a URL to a product, magento set up a URL redirect from the old URL to the new URL. Is this an option with Magento for your URL change suggestion or would I just have to live with the 404's until my customers/previous visitors start to use the new URLs?
Thanks
-
Hi Thomas,
I'm familiar with Magento and familiar with SEO.
If you go to the magento admin panel, and go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine optimization, there is an option for:
Use Categories Path for Product URLs (which you have set to YES right now) and also this: Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products - which you may have set to yes o no. Enabling this last option tells Google that Product A is available under different URL's but it's the same page. This is how I had my setup. However, the rel canonical implementation is just a suggestion to search bots, not a directive, and from what I have read, when you have the same page appearing under 4 to 5 different categories, it is really down to Google and other bots to agree with you on the canonical.
So, I decided to set "Use Category Path for Product URL's" to NO - this means that your product will only be viewable under http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 which gets rid of duplicate content issues - you do lose the keyword rich URL's created by the category paths, but in the end I chose this option.
IMPORTANT: If you change that setting now, it will create a lot of 404's for you, as you probably have those indexed already in Google - this is a decision that in the short term creates a lot of work, but longer term I think solves a lot of problems.
Hope that helps,
Ben
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 content issue
Hi, A client of ours has one URL for the moment (https://aalst.mobilepoint.be/) and wants to create a second one with exactly the same content (https://deinze.mobilepoint.be/). Will that mean Google punishes the second one because of duplicate content? What are the recommendations?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Duplicates - How to know if trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages?
Hi, How do you determine whether trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages? Search Console is showing both /about and about/ for example but how do I know whether this is a problem? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
Exact Match Domain & Title Tag / URL
I currently own an exact match domain for my keyword. I have it set up with multiple pages and also a blog. The home page essentially serves as a hub and contains links to all the pages and the blog. My targeted keyword is on its own page and I made the title tag the same as my keyword. As an example the URL for my targeted post looks like this: benefitsofrunningshoes.com/benefits-of-running-shoes I have solid, non-spammy content and clean whitehat earned backlinks directing to that specific page. My concern right now is that the URL looks kinda spammy. The website has been live for about a week and the home page ranks well enough but my targeted page is no where to be found. (it does show up if I manually search via search command "site:benefitsofrunningshoes.com"). I'm wondering if it is acceptable to use the exact keyword in title tag / page url if it is also in the domain as an EMD? Should I change the title tag and leave the URL in? Or should I completely change the title tag and URL and 301 redirect to the new page? I appreciate any help!
Technical SEO | | Kusanagi170 -
Avoiding duplicate content on internal pages
Lets say I'm working on a decorators website and they offer a list of residential and commercial services, some of which fall into both categories. For example "Internal Decorating" would have a page under both Residential and Commercial, and probably even a 3rd general category of Services too. The content inside the multiple instances of a given page (i.e. Internal Decorating) at best is going to be very similar if not identical in some instances. I'm just a bit concerned that having 3 "Internal Decorating" pages could be detrimental to the website's overall SEO?
Technical SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Duplicates on the page
Hello SEOMOZ, I've one big question about one project. We have a page http://eb5info.com/eb5-attorneys and a lot of other similar pages. And we got a big list of errors, warnings saying that we have duplicate pages. But in real not all of them are same, they have small differences. For example - you select "State" in the left sidebar and you see a list on the right. List on the right panel is changing depending on the what you selecting on the left. But on report pages marked as duplicates. Maybe you can give some advices how to improve quality of the pages and make SEO better? Thanks Igor
Technical SEO | | usadvisors0 -
Lots of duplicate content warnings
I have a site that says that I have 2,500 warnings. It is a real estate website and of course we use feeds. it says I have a lot of duplicate content. One thing is a page called "Request an appointment" and that is a url for each listing. Since there are 800 listings on my site. How could I solve this problem so that this doesn't show up as duplicate content since I use the same "Request an Appointment" verbeage on each of those? I guess my developer who used php to do it, created a dedicated url to each. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SeaC0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles
A few weeks ago my error count went up for Duplicate Page Content and Titles. 4 errors in all. A week later the errors were gone... But now they are back. I made changes to the Webconfig over a month ago but nothing since. SEOmoz is telling me the duplicate content is this http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ and http://www.antiquebanknotes.com Thanks for any advise! This is the relevant web.config. <rewrite><rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.antiquebanknotes.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
<action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" www.antiquebanknotes.com="" {r:1"="">http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/{R:1}" />
</action></match></rule>
<rule name="Default Page" enabled="true" stopprocessing="true"><match url="^default.aspx$"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll"><add input="{REQUEST_METHOD}" pattern="GET"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="/"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite>0 -
Seomoz is showing duplicate page content for my wordpress blog
Hi Everyone, My seomoz crawl diagnostics is indicating that I have duplicate content issues in the wordpress blog section of my site located at: http://www.cleversplash.com/blog/ What is the best strategy to deal with this? Is there a plugin that can resolve this? I really appreciate your help guys. Martin
Technical SEO | | RogersSEO0