Best practice to solve this Unique duplicate page content issue?
-
I just got Seomoz Pro (it's awesome!), and when I did a campaign for my website I discovered that I have a big issue with duplicate page content (as well as titles).
The Crawl Diagnostics Summary told me I have 196 Crawl Errors Found (I had a total of 362 pages crawled on my site), and as much as 160 of these was duplicate page content. Which to me sounds like a big problem, correct me if I'm wrong (I'm very new to SEO).
So our website is an ecommerce that sells greeting cards. The unique part about our platform is that we offer the customer to make a customization of the cards.
Let me walk you through each step a customer takes so you fully understand:-
They find a card they like and visit the product page of that card (just like on any ecommerce store.)
-
They then decide they want to buy it. There is no "Add to cart" button, they will instead click on a "customize the card" button.
3) This takes them to a step by step process of customizing the card. They change the name on the front of the greeting card so it says for example: "Happy Birthday Katy!". And then adds a personal text on the inside of the card.
- They then add an delivery address and when it should be delivered. After that they proceed to checkout and it's all done.
This is my website (it's in Swedish): loveday.se - it will take you to a product page so that you can click the green button and see what I mean with the customization pages. Hopefully it helps even though it's in Swedish.
My issue starts at the customization part of the site (the bolded step above), as I can see the permalinks in the diagnostics I got.
This step-by-step process looks exactly the same with every card in the store. Same call-to-action headline, same descriptive text etc. The only difference is a JPEG-file with the unique greeting card design.So, what is your take on this? Let me know if I was unclear about something.
Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.
-
-
Ahh, I see! Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it.
I also found from reading one of evovlingSEO's blog posts that with the help of checking my google webmasters account for any reports on duplicate content, I could see if Google had found any duplicate content.
There was no reports on this, so I guess it could be Roger crawling pages that Google don't? But I can see from viewing my source code that the code snippet you suggested me to add isn't there.
I will get back when I know if it's been solved or not for sure!
Thanks again.
-
I see what you mean. Here's what you do for these particular pages.
Since these have no real value as a search engine landing page (since they're basically all the same), Google won't want to send people to them. Seems reasonable, right?
But, because your site has a whole lot of these, Google may also decide that loveday.se as a whole is feeding them content that has a high % of non-useful pages. It's an indicator of an overall low-quality site. This really started to become an issue with the first "Panda" update. So, for each of these particular pages, you want to add a tag to your HEAD section:
| name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /> |
| We tell Google "noindex", because we don't want these pages in their index (really, they don't either, so everyone is happy). They're terrible landing pages for a search engine. |We tell Google to "follow", because the other pages that these are linking to are still of value. And we want Googlebot to continue crawling and crediting internal links on your site.
-
When looking at this link: http://www.loveday.se/personifering/1/utan-facebook
I get these sample URLs (It says it's a total of 50 duplicate URLs):
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/168/julkortshanghttp://www.loveday.se/personifering/145/far-motherfucker
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/123/prispokal
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/136/gravitation
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/63/fing-love-you
I'd say that out of all the 160 duplicate content pages, 99.9% of them have the same link path of http://www.loveday.se/personifiering/... Which is the customization page.
-
Could you provide a few samples of URL's that SEOmoz Pro claims contain duplicate content? It should show you if you click on the error, then click on individual links.
Built some companies, sold some companies. Currently building https://roi.fyi.
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 and Other Issues from Blog Tags and Categories
I have recently taken over the maintenance/redesign of our website and after setting up Moz I see many errors:
On-Page Optimization | | jgoethert
Duplicate content
Missing descriptions
Duplicate titles
etc. All are related to blog categories and tags. My questions are: are these errors hurting us? Should I simply remove tags/categories from the sitemaps or bite the bullet and create content for every single category page? Our site is https://financiallysimple.com/ and we are using Yoast plugin in Wordpress (if that helps)2 -
Duplicate content affects on overall rankings
Hi guys, I have a website that has 23 pages with duplicate content. These pages serve the same function, which enables customers to upload their images. There is not much content on each one but we require a different page for each of our products, here is an example page: http://www.point101.com/giclee_printing/upload#/upload I don't think it makes sense to use a canonical tag as each page is for a different product and I think its going to be difficult to differentiate each page. I was wondering: 1. If this has a negative effect on the ranking of our homepage and other main product pages or if its an issue we do not need to worry too much about. 2. If anyone has any other ideas as to how we can resolve this issue. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | KerryK
Kerry0 -
Duplicate Content
I'm currently working on a site that sells appliances. Currently, there are thousands of "issues" with this site, many of them dealing with duplicate content. Now, the product pages can be viewed in "List" or "Grid" format. As Lists, they have very little in the way of content. My understanding is that the duplicate content arises from different URLs going to the same site. For instance, the site might have a different URL when told to display 9 items than when told to display 15. This could then be solved by inserting rel = canonical. Is there a way to take a site and get a list of all possible duplicates? This would be much easier than slogging through every iteration of the options and copying down the URLs. Also, is there anything I might be missing in terms of why there is duplicate content? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | David_Moceri0 -
Product page reviews issues
Hi, We've implemented pagination on the reviews with rel=next/prev, but have seen no improvements since this. An example page with reviews is here. Can you see any issues on this that would be causing the problem? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | pikka0 -
Content placment best for SEO?
We currently have a scroll bar box at the bottom of our page with information in but from what I can see scroll bar boxes at the bottom of websites looking a little spammy (a lot of over optimized websites using them) would we be best in using a strategy like this site www.solopress.com/ which implement a show more link that drops information down would this be read as good information for Google or look just as spammy?
On-Page Optimization | | BobAnderson1 -
What is the best duplicate content checker that will check by phrase?
I create a lot of landing pages for individual keywords on my site. An issue that I've run into is I unknowingly use some common phrases repeatedly on different pages and therefore sometimes get dinged by Google. I'm basically looking for a tool that would check the content of a new page against all the other pages on my site and check it phrase by phrase. Most of the tools I've found make you put in two URLs to check against - I need it to check against hundreds.
On-Page Optimization | | davegr0 -
Social media links/buttons - best practices
Has anyone tested social media buttons, to see which types, styles, and placements get the most clicks? Should they go at the top of an article, or are they OK at the bottom? Should the icons definitely have labels? Display # of tweets and Likes? How big should they be? My preference is for discrete buttons with a smallish, plain icon and a label. I don't display tweets or Likes, unless it's a healthy number. And I still think a "share by email" icon is important. I put them at the bottom of the article, to keep the home page uncluttered and lead the eye into reading the article. I'm also concerned about leaking rank from the homepage, especially for a site that's still establishing itself. But if moving buttons to the top gets more shares, that's probably better. Is there a Wordpress plugin that you really like? (I haven't found one yet - I'm still hardcoding my social media buttons.) Opinions are great, but test results are better! Can anyone share?
On-Page Optimization | | mattotoole1 -
Urgent, Duplicate page title and content at eCommerce site- how to solve
Hi, there, does anyone can help to solve 'duplicate page title, duplicate page content' problem? it is a eCommerce site, each categories has hundreds of products, so there are more than 10 pages, but the report crawl the errors, i totally have no idea, can anyone help? Thanks a lot! Anna
On-Page Optimization | | anna-2944510