undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. On-Page Optimization
  4. Duplicate page titles and Content in Woocommerce

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.

Duplicate page titles and Content in Woocommerce

On-Page Optimization
3
11
5.2k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • jeeyer
    jeeyer last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 5:47 PM

    Hi Guys,

    I'm new to Moz and really liking it so far!
    I run a eCommerce site on Wordpress + WooCommerce and ofcourse use Yoast for SEO optimalisation

    I've got a question about my first Crawl report which showed over 600 issues! 😐 I've read that this is something that happens more often (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success).

    Most of them are categorized under:
    1. Duplicate Page Titles or;
    2. Duplicate Page Content.

    Duplicate Page Titles:
    These are almost only: product category pages and product tags. Is this problem beeing solved by giving them the right SEO SERP? I see that a lot of categories don't have a proper SEO SERP set up in yoast! Do I need to add this to clear this issue, or do I need to change the actual Title? And how about the Product tags?

    Another point (bit more off-topic) I've read here:  http://moz.com/community/q/yoast-seo-plugin-to-index-or-not-to-index-categories  that it's advised to noindex/follow Categories and Tags but isn't that a wierd idea to do for a eCommerce site?!

    Duplicate Page Content:
    Same goes here almost only Product Categories and product tags that are displayed as duplicate Page content! When I check the results I can click on a blue button for example "+ 17 duplicates" and that shows me (in this case 17 URLS) but they are not related to the fist in any way so not sure where to start here?

    Thanks for taking the time to help out!
    Joost

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • jeeyer
      jeeyer last edited by Apr 13, 2015, 4:56 PM Apr 13, 2015, 4:56 PM

      Hi Dan,

      Thanks for the great answer! Really helpfull.
      Best,

      Joost

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • evolvingSEO
        evolvingSEO @jeeyer last edited by Apr 13, 2015, 12:17 PM Apr 13, 2015, 12:17 PM

        Hi Joost - I'll try to tackle each of the questions one by one:

        • About categories, I'm not sure of the specifics, but you'll definitely want to find a category variable that just pulls in the category name for you. What that variable is, I am not sure off the top of my head.
        • The way I'd look at it - you don't want to end up with a "category" that's so deep or specific it only have a couple products in it. You may as well rank a product page instead. So long as your categories have maybe 5+ products which makes it useful for the user, you'd be fine I think.
        • I wouldn't worry about duplicate content. The "duplicate content" scare from years back is only a penalty if you are scraping content from other sites and building a whole website off of other people's content. I would just judge each page individually and aim for it being as helpful to the user as possible - in terms of trying to predict their questions, fears, doubts, etc in terms of actually purchasing the product 🙂
        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • jeeyer
          jeeyer @RyanPurkey last edited by Apr 11, 2015, 3:06 PM Apr 11, 2015, 3:06 PM

          Thanks Ryan, clear as a bell!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • RyanPurkey
            RyanPurkey @jeeyer last edited by Apr 11, 2015, 11:35 AM Apr 11, 2015, 11:35 AM

            There was a nice discussion here on tags: http://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-tag-pages-noindex that still applies. In general they tend to eliminate duplicate content issues when noindexed.

            jeeyer 1 Reply Last reply Apr 11, 2015, 3:06 PM Reply Quote 1
            • jeeyer
              jeeyer @evolvingSEO last edited by Apr 11, 2015, 6:11 AM Apr 11, 2015, 6:11 AM

              Hey Dan!

              Thanks for taking the time to write back.

              I found your article very helpfull! But I wasn't sure if I coud use your tips because you expressly stated that you were talking about a normal wordpress blog and not eCommerce. So really nice you took the time to look in to this matter.

              It think the  problem with my duplicate page titles has started when I set a template for the product categories because it's not working. I've used the template: %%ct_product_cat%% | %%sitename%% but I see a lot of product categories return:  (empty) | %%sitename %%. And all of these don't have an individual SEO title set by myself. The ones that have an individual SEO title will return that one.

              Just to make clear, I've done this because %%category%% is also not an option to use as template. I followed this link http://zendenwebdesign.com/woocommerce-product-category-taxonomy-with-wordpress-seo-by-yoast/

              About the deepness of indexing:
              With your last bulletpoint you mean that: If I have a category and within that category products for let's say sunglasses (and I target the same keyword for the category and the article as well) it depends on which will rank better (category or ind. product) for the highest index?

              For my individual product pages I use tabs (theme shortcodes that output tabs on frontend) I use 4:

              • About (product info content optimized around keyword)
              • Brand (brand info)
              • Sizing
              • Shipping

              The Brand info and shipping tab are on a lot of product pages the same. I've got multiple products from a brand and the shipping is for every product (+300) the same. Although Yoast returns a Good SEO score (so does Scribe) do you think this can be seen as duplicate content? Is it better to load this kind of information directly in to the product page template? For less duplicate content issues? (not sure if it even will be seens as duplicate).

              Best.Joost

              evolvingSEO 1 Reply Last reply Apr 13, 2015, 12:17 PM Reply Quote 0
              • evolvingSEO
                evolvingSEO last edited by May 6, 2015, 4:02 PM Apr 10, 2015, 12:18 PM

                Hi Joost

                Dan here (I wrote that Setting Up WordPress article 🙂 )

                Without seeing your site, it's tough to be 100% sure, but here's what I would make sure you're doing:

                • Noindex subpages of archives
                • Index categories
                • Noindex tags
                • Set up title templates for categories so maybe they say "Browse Category Name - Sitename" (something call to action like for eCommerce)

                The key with how "deep" you index categories may depend on:

                • search volume
                • how many extra pages per level that causes to get indexed etc
                • where it starts competing with actual products that could rank instead

                I find it's good to hit that sweet spot where you don't get a ridiculous amount of pages indexed, but are deep enough in the categories with search volume to not miss out on any traffic.

                jeeyer 1 Reply Last reply Apr 11, 2015, 6:11 AM Reply Quote 2
                • jeeyer
                  jeeyer @RyanPurkey last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 7:48 PM Apr 9, 2015, 7:48 PM

                  Ok very clear. I will determine per category if I want to index them or not. And keep in mind the uniqueness and potential rank.

                  I indeed don't have to be way too focused on the results from the crawl. But our categories rank really
                  Bad (so then the first guess is; maybe because of duplicate content moz is telling me).

                  Or because they are actually "empty" pages with products that are categorized in it. But that goes for every ecommerce site, right? Maybe I need to write a short description per category and style it with HTML to make it more attractive and give it more content.

                  How are your thoughts on tags?

                  RyanPurkey 1 Reply Last reply Apr 11, 2015, 11:35 AM Reply Quote 0
                  • RyanPurkey
                    RyanPurkey @jeeyer last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 7:22 PM Apr 9, 2015, 7:20 PM

                    Right. It's kind of a combination of categories you want to rank for and ones that are populated and active enough to rank. Brand C Shirts would be fine, but Brand C Short Sleeve shirts could be too diluted. You're on the right track.

                    Also, there are some instances where the Moz tool just doesn't align with what you would not consider duplicate content and in those cases feel free to ignore it, especially if those pages are ranking well and performing well in terms of conversion / funnel.  Cheers!

                    jeeyer 1 Reply Last reply Apr 9, 2015, 7:48 PM Reply Quote 1
                    • jeeyer
                      jeeyer @RyanPurkey last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 7:05 PM Apr 9, 2015, 7:05 PM

                      Hi Ryan,

                      Thanks for clearing this out for me! Sounds like a good appraoch! With top level you mean the parents categories? Or categories that I want to rank for?

                      For example we have a webstore and sell clothing from Scandinavian cloting brands. If I should index only the parents I get: tshits/pants/sweaters/jackets etc (these are to general imo). But the sub-categories which display the brands are much better to rank because they get a lot more search volume for example.

                      This is the structure we use:
                      Shirts:

                      • Brand A (url is /product-category/shirts/branda-shirts) <- these are keywords that our target audience use when they search for shirts from that brand! high potential for us
                      • Brand B (url is /product-category/shirts/brandb-shirts)
                      • Brand C (url is /product-category/shirts/brandc-shirts)

                      Let me know what your thoughts are.Joost

                      RyanPurkey 1 Reply Last reply Apr 9, 2015, 7:20 PM Reply Quote 0
                      • RyanPurkey
                        RyanPurkey last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 6:41 PM Apr 9, 2015, 6:41 PM

                        Hi Joost. The reasoning behind noindexing category and tag pages is because they have a high tendency to show up as duplicate content--as you've just experienced. People like to keep them as part of their site due to user friendliness but often these pages on their own are a reshuffling of content and can be highly repetitive from a search engine perspective. Ideally you keep your top level categories that are unique within the index and noindex the rest.  Feel free to keep links within your site as followed.  Cheers!

                        jeeyer 1 Reply Last reply Apr 9, 2015, 7:05 PM Reply Quote 2
                        • 1 / 1
                        1 out of 11
                        • First post
                          1/11
                          Last post

                        Got a burning SEO question?

                        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                        Start my free trial


                        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.

                        • See all categories

                        Related Questions

                        • JCN-SBWD

                          Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page

                          negative seo keywords inaccurate serp ranking ignored optimization

                          I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
                          “Copyright free rock music"
                          “Uncopyrighted rock music”
                          “Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.

                          On-Page Optimization | May 3, 2023, 3:00 PM | JCN-SBWD
                          0
                        • AslanBarselinov

                          Duplicate content in sidebar

                          Hi guys. So I have a few sentences (about 50 words) of duplicate content across all pages of my website (this is a repeatable text in sidebar). Each page of my website contains about 1300 words (unique content) in total, and 50 words of duplicate content in sidebar. Does having a duplicate content of this length in sidebar affect the rankings of my website in any way? Thank you so much for your replies.

                          On-Page Optimization | Jun 9, 2019, 11:46 PM | AslanBarselinov
                          1
                        • Donsimong

                          Duplicating words in the page title OK?

                          Im finding a site with lots of duplicated words in the title tags, I have always avoided doing this in the past, Is there any penalty for having a word repeated twice in the title, indeed is there a benefit from having it twice, IM assuming not
                          For example: Marketing Services in Milton Keynes | Our Services | TFA
                          https://www.t-f-a.co.uk/services the word service is repeated twice, in my opinion this is of no benefit at all and is better rewritten to remove the duplication

                          On-Page Optimization | Jul 18, 2019, 3:19 AM | Donsimong
                          1
                        • heymarshall

                          How to Handle duplicate pages/titles in Wordpress

                          The wordpress blog causes problems with page titles. If you go to the second page of blog posts it there's a different URL but with the same page title. for example: page 1: site/blog page 2: site/blog/page/2 Each page gets flagged for duplicate page titles. Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

                          On-Page Optimization | Feb 12, 2015, 8:13 PM | heymarshall
                          1
                        • mattdinbrooklyn

                          Duplicate Content on Event Pages

                          My client has a pretty popular service of event listings and, in hope of gathering more events, they opened up the platform to allow users to add events. This works really well for them and they are able to garner a lot more events this way. The major problem I'm finding is that many event coordinators and site owners will take the copy from their website and copy and paste it, duplicating a lot of the content. We have editor picks that contain a lot of unique content but the duplicate content scares me. It hasn't hurt our page ranking (we have a page ranking of 7) but I'm wondering if this is something that we should address. We don't have the manpower to eliminate all the duplication but if we cut down the duplication would we experience a significant advantage over people posting the same event?

                          On-Page Optimization | Oct 18, 2013, 7:01 PM | mattdinbrooklyn
                          0
                        • A Former User

                          Changing page titles and google penalties?

                          I just recently learned that changing your page title earns you a google penalty.  Unfortunately i learned this after playing around with my page titles a bit to get the most optimal page titles.  Does anybody know how long this google penalty lasts? is it forever? or just temporary?

                          On-Page Optimization | Jun 15, 2011, 10:00 PM | A Former User
                          0
                        • MeghanPrudencio

                          Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?

                          Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy

                          On-Page Optimization | Mar 8, 2011, 9:32 PM | MeghanPrudencio
                          0
                        • smaavie

                          Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?

                          We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
                          Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
                          Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
                          find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
                          find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards

                          On-Page Optimization | Jun 2, 2013, 5:08 PM | smaavie
                          5

                        Get started with Moz Pro!

                        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                        Start my free trial
                        Products
                        • Moz Pro
                        • Moz Local
                        • Moz API
                        • Moz Data
                        • STAT
                        • Product Updates
                        Moz Solutions
                        • SMB Solutions
                        • Agency Solutions
                        • Enterprise Solutions
                        Free SEO Tools
                        • Domain Authority Checker
                        • Link Explorer
                        • Keyword Explorer
                        • Competitive Research
                        • Brand Authority Checker
                        • Local Citation Checker
                        • MozBar Extension
                        • MozCast
                        Resources
                        • Blog
                        • SEO Learning Center
                        • Help Hub
                        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                        • How-to Guides
                        • Moz Academy
                        • API Docs
                        About Moz
                        • About
                        • Team
                        • Careers
                        • Contact
                        Why Moz
                        • Case Studies
                        • Testimonials
                        Get Involved
                        • Become an Affiliate
                        • MozCon
                        • Webinars
                        • Practical Marketer Series
                        • MozPod
                        Connect with us

                        Contact the Help team

                        Join our newsletter

                        Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

                        Moz logo
                        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                        • Accessibility
                        • Terms of Use
                        • Privacy

                        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.