Use Nonindex or Canonical on product tags of a e-commerce site
-
I run a e-commerce site and we have many product tags. These product tags come up as "Duplicate Page Content" when Moz does it's crawl. I was wondering if I should use Nonindex or Canonical? The tags all go to the same product when used so I figure I would just nonindex them but was wondering what's the best for SEO?
-
Hi Emmett
So good to hear! For reference, here's what I recommended to Emmett...
I would just goto the category pages creating duplicate content issues and add some text. Here's an example from an Inflow article I often reference (http://www.goinflow.com/duplicate-content-ecommerce-seo/
"Category pages on eCommerce websites typically include a title and product grid. This means that there is no unique content on these pages. The common solution to combat this is to add unique descriptions at the top of category pages (not the bottom, where content is given less weight by search engines) that describes what types are featured within the category. There is no magic number of words or characters to use, however the more robust the content is, the better chance the page will be able to maximize traffic from organic search results (due to long-tail keyword traffic). A benchmark of 100-300 words is common. It’s important to understand screen resolutions of your visitors and ensure that the product grid is not pushed below the fold on their browsers. Doing so could limit user discoverability of the product grid upon visiting the category page.
Tip: Intro descriptions on category pages offer a great opportunity to build deep links to related sub-category pages, related article content that may exist on the site, and popular products that deserve attention and link equity."
If you have the opportunity to do so, try that out. You're developing unique content for that page and also giving the user a bit of perspective to really "sell" them on your products.
Again - glad to hear this worked! Let me know if you need anything else!
-
So adding description did work. If you have multiple product tags that comes up as duplicated pages, just a description to the tags and that will fix everything.
Cheers!
Emmett
-
Thanks for the update, Emmett. And best of luck to you! Looking forward to some even better news soon!
Christy
-
Sounds great Emmett! Let me know if you need anything else and how everything goes!!
-
So Patrick came to the conclusion to add a description to the each product tag page which is good for SEO and a good marketing technique. I add the descriptions and I'm just wait 48 hours to do a new crawl test. I'll update you as soon as it's a confirmed solution.
Cheers!
Emmett
-
Hi Emmett, have you been able to sort this out yet? We'd love an update, thanks!
Christy
-
AH! Just saw it! Sorry for my delay! I will respond here in a few! Thanks Emmett.
-
Hey Patrick,
I sent you a message with a link to the website and the product page. Let me know what you think.
I appreciate your time!
-
Guys, please could you let me know the outcome of this as well. I realise the necessity of the canonical tag regarding the categorization of pages but this tag issue is a concern to me so I would really appreciate the findings.
-
Hi Emmett
Could you shoot me a private message and let me take a look? I think I am following what you're saying, but without a real life example, I don't know how much help I can be. I still stand by canonicalizing your main product pages, in my example...
www.example.com/products/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
...for the other two pages...
www.example.com/collections/frontpage/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
www.example.com/clothing/womens/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeansSo, these two pages above would have...
...in their . But again, if you could pass me a link or URL, I can see what's going on and be of more assistance!
Hope this will help you a bit better! Thanks so much!
-
Yeah it's like that. I'll elaborate my situation better with your example:
Product 1 URL: www.example.com/products/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
Product Tag 1: www.example.com/product-tag/women-jeans
Product Tag 2: www.example.com/product-tag/blue-jeans
Product 2 URL**:** ww.example.com/products/blue-regular-fit-jeans
Product Tag 1: www.example.com/product-tag/women-jeans
Product Tag 2: www.example.com/product-tag/blue-jeans
When you go to one of the product tags webpage, both products come up on the webpage.
Since both these products show up in the same product tag webpage and I can only use one URL per canonical tag, how do I determine what canonical URL to put in the product tag code? Would I just pick a product and associate a tag to it? For Example, Use Product 2 URL as the canonical tag for Product Tag 2 and Product 1 URL for Product Tag 1?
-
Hi Emmett
For each product, do URLs look something like this when it comes to tags...
www.example.com/products/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
www.example.com/collections/frontpage/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
www.example.com/clothing/womens/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeansIf that's the case, you will want to put a canonical tag on these pages for the page you want to appear in search and rank. The reason you are doing so is because you have three different URLs for the same product. You want search engines to know this is not duplicate content.
Does this make sense? Or am I not following along correctly? Let me know, as I would love to get you where you need to be! Thanks!
-
Thanks for the quick response!
I'm still a little confused. The way the site is setup is that we have many different products that share the same "products tags" (so each product tag is linked to multiple products). Each product has many products tags (about 10 per product). I'm not sure how to use a canonical tag on a tag that is associated to multiple products, or on a product that is associated to many tags.
Do you have any suggestions?
-
Hi there
Emmett - do not noindex. Use a canonical tag on these tagged pages - you can learn more here.
You can also categorize parameters in Google Webmaster Tools.
Hope this helps a bit!
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
-
Sites in multiple countries using same content question
Hey Moz, I am looking to target international audiences. But I may have duplicate content. For example, I have article 123 on each domain listed below. Will each content rank separately (in US and UK and Canada) because of the domain? The idea is to rank well in several different countries. But should I never have an article duplicated? Should we start from ground up creating articles per country? Some articles may apply to both! I guess this whole duplicate content thing is quite confusing to me. I understand that I can submit to GWT and do geographic location and add rel=alternate tag but will that allow all of them to rank separately? www.example.com www.example.co.uk www.example.ca Please help and thanks so much! Cole
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
Breadcrumbs for E Commerce Site
Hi, Does anyone have experience with Breadcrumb nodes for e-commerce? http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.overstock.com%2FOffice-Supplies%2FOffice-Star-Professional-Air-Grid-Deluxe-Task-Chair%2F2605023%2Fproduct.html What happens if your product appears in more than one category? Should you let google spider the various breadcrumb routes to the category?? Which one would take preference in results? Right now, for ease of management, we have not enabled category URL paths to the product - so the product appears right after the domain, for example, www.mydomain.com/en/myproduct.html - If we do enable category URL paths, Any comments or opinions? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Best way to implement canonical tags on an ecommerce site with many filter options?
What would be the best way to add canonical tags to an ecommerce site with many filter options, for example, http://teacherexpress.scholastic.com? Should I include a canonical tag for all filter options under a category even though the pages don't have the same content? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Product Descriptions for a product with many designs
I'm a newbie with SEO and I have a question regarding product descriptions. Let's say I am selling 100 dog id tags. The tags are all made of same materials, same size, just different designs. Now for the product description, do I need to write a different set of description for all 100 tags? This is an example of a short product description(there's more) for all the pet tags: Personalized with 4 lines of information and 20 characters in each line. Lifetime guarantee - If your pet ID tag ever becomes illegible, we will replace it free of charge. Solid one-piece construction - No glued or ""sandwiched"" materials to wear out or fall apart. Split ring for collar attachement included with EVERY tag. Countless uses - School backpacks, luggage, fashion accessories, and many more! All of the above information pertains to all the pet tags. Can all my product descriptions contain that information, or will I need to modify this 100 times for each individual pet tag? I read up a lot on duplicate content so I am slightly confused. Will this hurt my SEO? Thanks, Keith
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ktw0160 -
E-commerce store, in need of protecting our own content
Dear other Moz fans, We have an E-commerce store in Norway. Our main conversion to sale still happens in our physical store, but do to the description and information we provide online.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Monica_Flirt
To warn you before you click; Our store is a boutique for "erotic items". A nice one how ever, made buy woman for woman and their man. We use enormous time writing descriptions and information for (almost) every item online.
We really want to protect our content (text information). What is the best practice to mark up "protection" of our hard work content? Thank you for your time.
Regards form the Flirt girls in Norway.0 -
Huge Google index on E-commerce site
Hi Guys, Refering back to my original post I would first like to thank you guys for all the advice. We implemented canonical url's all over the site and noindexed some url's with robots.txt and the site already went from 100.000+ url's indexed to 87.000 urls indexed in GWT. My question: Is there way to speed this up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssiebn7
I do know about the way to remove url's from index (with noindex of robots.txt condition) but this is a very intensive way to do so. I was hoping you guys maybe have a solution for this.. 🙂0 -
Can I use rel=canonical and then remove it?
Hi all! I run a ticketing site and I am considering using rel=canonical temporary. In Europe, when someone is looking for tickets for a soccer game, they look for them differently if the game is played in one city or in another city. I.e.: "liverpool arsenal tickets" - game played in the 1st leg in 2012 "arsenal liverpool tickets - game played in the 2nd leg in 2013 We have two different events, with two different unique texts but sometimes Google chooses the one in 2013 one before the closest one, especially for queries without dates or years. I don't want to remove the second game from our site - exceptionally some people can broswer our website and buy tickets with months in advance. So I am considering place a rel=canonical in the game played in 2013 poiting to the game played in a few weeks. After that, I would remove it. Would that make any sense? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
Proper use and coding of rel = "canonical" tag
I'm working on a site that has pages for many wedding vendors. There are essentially 3 variations of the page for each vendor with only slightly different content, so they're showing up as "duplicate content" in my SEOmoz Campaign. Here's an example of the 3 variations: http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161 http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=messageWrite http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=writeReview Because of this, we placed a rel="canoncial" tag in the second 2 pages to try to fix the problem. However, the coding does not seem to validate in the w3 html validator. I can't say I understand html well enough to understand the error the validator is pointing out. We also added a the following to the second 2 types of pages <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> Am I employing this tag correctly in this case? Here is a snippet of the code below. <html> <head> <title>Reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MAtitle> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="[/includes/style.css](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/includes/style.css)"> <link href="[http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161)" rel="canonical" /> <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffreytrull1
<meta name="keywords" content="Astonishing Event, Inc, Somerset Massachusetts, Massachusetts Wedding Wedding Planners Directory, Massachusetts weddings, wedding Massachusetts ">
<meta name="description" content="Get information and read reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MA. Astonishing Event, Inc appears in the directory of Somerset MA wedding Wedding Planners on WeddingReportsMA.com."> <script src="[http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js](view-source:http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js)" type="text/javascript">script> <script type="text/javascript"> _uacct = "UA-173959-2"; urchinTracker(); script> head>0