Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce
-
Hi,
My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles -
The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are
Products Map :: Company Name
How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it?
Thanks.
-
That's what I'd do. Just make sure to set up a 301 redirect from all of those pages to the homepage, so you don't lose any visitors with the change.
-
Kristina,
thanks for continuing input-
We have an XML site map- Knowing that combined with what you said- It seems that the answer is to just take that products_map.php off the site?
Thanks again!!
-
Hi Frank,
I would change the page titles to:
Tommeys Mardi Gras | [letter] | [page #]
For example, http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=4's page title would be:
Tommeys Mardi Gras | C | 4
That'll at least make them different, and show the structure of your site better. Generally, you want the page title first, then the brand, but since most people aren't going to search for the letter C, I put those last.
But, in general, it's probably better not to have massive indexes like this on your site. The category pages are much better for search engine optimization, and when you have both category pages and alphabetical lists, you're duplicating that content.
-
Kristina,
Thanks for the reply- Here are some of the links that are showing as errors for duplicate page titles.
http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=M&page=5
http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=Y
http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=4
http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=2
Plus many more..
They all have the page title: Products Map :: Toomey's Mardi Gras
Looking forward to your advice.
Thank you!
Frank
-
Hi Frank,
I think that the link you shared is locked for you personally. Do you mind sharing your website URL so we can look it up in Open Site Explorer ourselves?
Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content per se, but it'll generally hurt your rankings:
- If your issue is that you have identical pages with different URLs, leading to duplicate page titles, your link building efforts are going to be split. Google will only rank one of your duplicate pages on its results page, and that page will be weaker because some backlinks go to the duplicate.
- If the issue is that you have different pages that happen to have the same title, both could rank, but the pages won't be easily distinguishable from each other on the results page. It's much better to have a unique page title so that searchers can see what they're going to get from your page.
Hope this helps,
Kristina
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
-
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Would Google Call These Pages Duplicate Content?
Our Web store, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/index.html, has struggled with duplicate content issues for some time. One aspect of duplicate content is a page like this: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html. When an audio book title goes out-of-publication we keep the page at our store and display a http://www.audiobooksonline.com/out-of-publication-audio-books-book-audiobook-audiobooks.html whenever a visitor attempts to visit a specific title that is OOP. There are several thousand OOP pages. Would Google consider these OOP pages duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | lbohen0 -
SEOMOZ and non-duplicate duplicate content
Hi all, Looking through the lovely SEOMOZ report, by far its biggest complaint is that of perceived duplicate content. Its hard to avoid given the nature of eCommerce sites that oestensibly list products in a consistent framework. Most advice about duplicate content is about canonicalisation, but thats not really relevant when you have two different products being perceived as the same. Thing is, I might have ignored it but google ignores about 40% of our site map for I suspect the same reason. Basically I dont want us to appear "Spammy". Actually we do go to a lot of time to photograph and put a little flavour text for each product (in progress). I guess my question is, that given over 700 products, why 300ish of them would be considered duplicates and the remaning not? Here is a URL and one of its "duplicates" according to the SEOMOZ report: http://www.1010direct.com/DGV-DD1165-970-53/details.aspx
Technical SEO | | fretts
http://www.1010direct.com/TDV-019-GOLD-50/details.aspx Thanks for any help people0 -
Uservoice and Duplicate Page Content
Hello All, I'm having an issue where the my UserVoice account is creating duplicate page content (image attached). Any ideas on how to resolve the problem? A couple solutions we're looking into: moving the uservoice content inside the app, so it won't get crawled, but that's all we got for now. Thank you very much for your time any insight would be helpful. Sincerely,
Technical SEO | | JonnyBird1
Jon Birdsong SalesLoft duplicate duplicate0 -
How unique does a page need to be to avoid "duplicate content" issues?
We sell products that can be very similar to one another. Product Example: Power Drill A and Power Drill A1 With these two hypothetical products, the only real difference from the two pages would be a slight change in the URL and a slight modification in the H1/Title tag. Are these 2 slight modifications significant enough to avoid a "duplicate content" flagging? Please advise, and thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | WhiteCap0 -
Duplicate Content - Home Page even wth Mod Rewrite 301
Hi, It looks like Seomoz (and Screaming Frog) is showing my home page as duplicate content. http://www.mydomain.com Page Authority 61 Linking root Domain 321 http://www.mydomain.com/ Page Authority 61 Linking root Domain 321 [Screaming Frog shows duplicate as]
Technical SEO | | Force7
www.mydomain.com/
www.mydomain.com/index.html} Years ago I hired someone to write the code for a rewrite for non www to be 301 redirected to www version. I was surprised at finding out that I still have a problem. Here is the code on my htaccess page. <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]</ifmodule> Was this code not properly written ? One more question, we were hit hard by Panda and Penguin, would something like this be that much of a factor. Thanks in advance, Force70 -
Mitigating duplicate page content on dynamic sites such as social networks and blogs.
Hello, I recently did an SEOMoz crawl for a client site. As it typical, the most common errors were duplicate page title and duplicate content. The client site is a custom social network for researchers. Most of the pages that showing as duplicate are simple variations of each user's profile such as comment sections, friends pages, and events. So my question is how can we limit duplicate content errors for a complex site like this. I already know about the rel canonical tag, and rel next tag, but I'm not sure if either of these will do the job. Also, I don't want to lose potential links/link juice for good pages. Are there ways of using the "noindex" tag in batches? For instance: noindex all urls containing this character? Or do most CMS allow this to be done systematically? Anyone with experience doing SEO for a custom Social Network or Forum, please advise. Thanks!!!
Technical SEO | | BPIAnalytics0 -
Crawl Errors for duplicate titles/content when canonicalised or noindexed
Hi there, I run an ecommerce store and we've recently started changing the way we handle pagination links and canonical links. We run Magento, so each category eg /shoes has a number of parameters and pages depending on the number of products in the category. For example /shoes?mode=grid will display products in grid view, /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 is page 2 in grid mode. Previously, all URL variations per category were canonicalised to /shoes. Now, we've been advised to paginate the base URLs with page number only. So /shoes has a pagination next link to /shoes?p=2, page 2 has a prev link to /shoes and a next link to /shoes?p=3. When any other parameter is introduced (such as mode=grid) we canonicalise that back to the main category URL of /shoes and put a noindex meta tag on the page. However, SEOMoz is picking up duplicate title warnings for urls like /shoes?p=2 and /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 despite the latter being canonicalised and having a noindex tag. Presumably search engines will look at the canonical and the noindex tag so this shouldn't be an issue. Is that correct, or should I be concerned by these errors? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Fergus_Macdonald0