Duplicate content, is it ever ok?
-
I am building a large site for a client who sells physical products. I am using WordPress as my CMS (as a piece of background information). There are a few products that need to be listed in the sites hierarchy in multiple locations as such:
-
Parent A
-
Child 1
-
Parent B
-
Child 2
-
Child 3
-
Parent C
-
Child 1
I am concerned that having a product exist in multiple instances will cause indexing problems for that product. I can't be the only person to come across this issue, would love some feedback on the best practices for such an issue.
Thanks in advance
-
-
Hey Jeseph,
I'd concur with Chris and Peter here
I would either structure your site so that individual products aren't in folders: e.g. yoursite.com/product-name; or if that's not possible use rel-canonical to indicate your preferred URL.
Thanks
Hannah
-
We have a similar structure in our web-store. However we don't use WordPress, our company has the same concerns. To use your example we also have a "Child 1" problem, at least as far as our thoughts about duplicate content are concerned. Our experience is that Google has NEVER marked our "Child 1" as duplicate. However our "Parent A" through "Parent C" categories have been marked as duplicate. So we have made changes in or categories to try and stem the issue.
After doing some research on Google duplicate content, they specifically say they only consider duplicate content when the content is similar when the base URL's come from two different sources. What this means to me is that: www.site1.com\Parent-A\Child-1 is a duplicate content to www.site2.com\something-new\Child-1
Where www.site1.com\Parent-A\Child-1 and www.site1.com\Parent-C\Child-1 are not considered duplicate content.
-
Hi Jeseph
Yes, duplicate content can be an issue especially if your sites has lots of it, plus you will get the situation where Google will only index one instance of each page.
The best way around is in your situation though is to have one instance of each product, but to use that instance in multiple locations from a browsing point of view. If done correctly, each product will have a unique URL, but the page it is on can be referenced from a variety of locations/categories.
So, for example, a page about a shiny blue pen could be linked to from a pens category and also a gifts category, but the URL of the shiny blue pen page can be the same, e.g. yourdomain.com/blue-shiny-pen.html so one page and not a duplicate.
In terms of the facilities within Wordpress to make that happen I am not a Wordpress expert but I know there are many on this forum who are, so I am sure someone will give you some guidance on that.
Peter
-
rel=canonical was made for just such a thing so there is not really an excuse, sure you won't have all of them indexed but at the same time it wont bring your whole site down. As long as the user can find that product (even if its in one instance) via Google then I presume that's good for you,.rel="canonical" wouldn't affect their (user) site navigation.
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? other issues? using vendor info when selling their prodcuts?
When building content for vendors that we sell their products? best practices? ok, to copy and paste "about us" info? or will that be flagged as duplicate content.
On-Page Optimization | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I am new to the MOZ Pro community. I got the below message for many of my pages. We have a video site so all content in the page except the video link would be different. How can i handle such pages. Can we place adsense AD's on these pages? Duplicate Page Content Code and content on this page looks similar or identical to code and content on other pages on your site. Search engines may not know which pages are best to include in their index and rankings. Common fixes for this issue include 301 redirects, using the rel=canonical tag, and using the Parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Central. For more information on duplicate content, visit http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content. Please help me to know how to handle this.. Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Nettv0 -
Duplicate content on domains we own
Hello! We are new to SEO and have a problem we have caused ourselves. We own two domains GoCentrix.com (old domain) and CallRingTalk.com (new domain that we want to SEO). The content was updated on both domains at about the same time. Both are identical with a few exceptions. Now that we are getting into SEO we now understand this to be a big issue. Is this a resolvable matter? At this point what is the best approach to handle this? So far we have considered a couple of options. 1. Change the copy, but on which site? Is one flagged as the original and the other duplicate? 2. Robots.txt noindex, nofollow on the old one. Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | CallRingTalk0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Forum
Hi Everyone, I just signed up last night and received the crawl stats for my site (ShapeFit.com). Since April of 2011, my site has been severely impacted by Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates and we have lost about 80% of our traffic during that time. I have been trying to follow the guidelines provided by Google to fix the issues and help recover but nothing seems to be working. The majority of my time has been invested in trying to add content to "thin" pages on the site and filing DMCA notices for copyright infringement issues. Since this work has not produced any noticeable recovery, I decided to focus my attention on removing bad backlinks and this is how I found SEOmoz. My question is about duplicate content. The crawl diagnostics showed 6,000 errors for duplicate page content and the same for duplicate page title. After reviewing the details, it looks like almost every page is from the forum (shapefit.com/forum). What's the best way to resolve these issues? Should I completely block the "forum" folder from being indexed by Google or is there something I can do within the forum software to fix this (I use phpBB)? I really appreciate any feedback that would help fix these issues so the site can hopefully start recovering from Panda/Penguin. Thank you, Kris
On-Page Optimization | | shapefit0 -
High Volume Duplicate Title and Content Errors: Scale of 1-10 How bad is this?
I have 15k pages and 1.5K have duplicate title and content errors. the reason is I have a ring parent page with child pages for each of the size variations. On a scale of 1-10 how big an issue is this and does it need fixing?
On-Page Optimization | | Tippman0 -
Content Update
Hello, If I update the existing content i.e.I added some content to the already existing indexed content in a post,how will it effect SEO wise? Venkee
On-Page Optimization | | Venkee0 -
Duplicate pages
Hi, I am using a CMS that generates dynamic urls that according to the SeoMoz tool will be indexed as duplicate pages. The pages in questions are forms, blog-posts etc. that are not crucial to achieve ranking for. I do worry though about the consequences of having 20 (non-duplicate)pages with static urls and about 100 pages that are duplicates with dynamic urls. What consequences will this have for the speed that the robots crawl the site and could there be negative effects on ranking for the entire domain?
On-Page Optimization | | vibelingo0 -
Content within JavaSccript code
I know that it is not a good practice to inlcude SEO content within JavaScript, but are there exceptions to what Google can spider or is it best to just avoid completely?
On-Page Optimization | | mjmorse0