Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
-
Hi Everyone,
I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob...
So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue:
Duplicate Page Title - Review:New
Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product
My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)?
My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this?
As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
-
Hi DakotahW,
Our store front is Volusion based as well and we recently began using Moz to aid in our efforts to improve our site SEO. We are experiencing the same problem with duplicate page content.
How did you go about correcting this issue? Do you have any advice on how we can avoid these errors?
-
1.) I can access the source code, and there is an option to override the default meta info for the review template using custom HTML - this is where I want to add the meta NOINDEX tag, correct?
Yes, sounds right
*also, it's pretty common sense but just to double check... if I add HTML to this field I'll want to paste the entire page's source code with the new robots meta tag included, not just the meta tag by itself, right?
Mmmm.... this sounds suspicious, especially if you are only editing the default meta info. You might need to do a little experimentation to figure this out.
2.) This is the direction where I was beginning to lean... in this case if the URL was "www.example.com/ReviewNew.asp?ProductCode=BLUEHAT13" would the parameter that identifies the reviews be "ReviewNew.asp" ?
The parameter here is "ProductCode" - which raises a good point. You want to make sure that this parameter isn't used by other page template, because you might block those as well.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi Cyrus,
Yes, each product page has a link to another page containing product review form they can fill out. And the more I continue to learn on the forum here, I'm beginning to understand why e-commerce platforms like Volusion aren't always the most friendly SEO-wise.
1.) I can access the source code, and there is an option to override the default meta info for the review template using custom HTML - this is where I want to add the meta NOINDEX tag, correct?
*also, it's pretty common sense but just to double check... if I add HTML to this field I'll want to paste the entire page's source code with the new robots meta tag included, not just the meta tag by itself, right?
2.) This is the direction where I was beginning to lean... in this case if the URL was "www.example.com/ReviewNew.asp?ProductCode=BLUEHAT13" would the parameter that identifies the reviews be "ReviewNew.asp" ?
Due to a growing lack of confidence in Volusion's out-of-the-box SEO features, I fear simply checking a box within their backend for a "one solution to all problems" may come back and bite me in the rear. I had briefly looked into parameter handling from Google Webmaster Tools and think this may be a better long-term solution. Not to mention, that I can at least identify when/where any issues originate from when/if they arise. Perhaps I'm beginning to outgrow my current shopping cart?
Anyways, thank you for the insightful response. Cheers!
-
Hi KLLC,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Making these pages no-index was my initial thought as it made the most sense. I know Volusion isn't the most SEO-friendly, so I think the biggest problem is understanding which of their out-of-the-box features can accomplish this without compromising how the rest of my site is crawlable. Again, thanks for the help!
-
Hi Dakotah,
If I understand correctly, you have multiple "leave a review" pages showing up in your SEOmoz reports, and each page is pretty much identical.
Yes, you are correct that you generally want to keep those pages out of the index.
Unfortunately, I don't believe Volusion is the most SEO friendly platform out of the box, and wrangling with it may require a bit of HTML knowledge
1. If you can access the source code, (using the LiveEdit function, perhaps?) it may serve you well to add a Meta NOINDEX tag to the head of your review template.
2. On the other hand, if this proves to technical, another option is parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools. You'll need a verified Webmaster account for this. You'd want to find, or enter, the parameter that identifies the reviews, i.e."?ProductCode=" and set googlebot to NO URLs.
Both of these options are both advanced and potentially dangerous. Back up your work and keep records of everything in case you need to make changes, or get someone to help.
Hope this helps. Let us know if you need more info, or if we're headed in the right direction. (Full disclosure - not many SEOs work with Volusion, so my knowledge is extremely limited)
-
Hello,
If you talk about SEOMoz crawler and the errors you get from your report, you must have basis changes for the critical issues. Example: you have added a review for each item page, tip: It must be built-in with the item page so that it will prevent you creating new pages with same title and ofcourse same content.
Second tip is if a review page follows to new page make that page nofollow, no-index so it will help or guide BOTS not to index these pages and your issue will be solved.
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
-
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
Webmaster is giving errors of Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Duplicate Title Tags
Webmaster is giving errors of Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Duplicate Title Tags after I changes the permalinks structure in wordpress. It there a quick fix for this and how damaging is the above for seo. Thanks T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Duplicate Content Issues :(
I am wondering how we can solve our duplicate content issues. Here is the thing: There are so many ways you can write a description about a used watch. http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-no-date-stainless-steel-watch-wsilver-dial-5500/ http://beckertime.com/product/mens-rolex-air-king-stainless-steel-date-watch-wblue-dial-5500/ Whats different between these two? The dial color. We have a lot of the same model numbers but with different conditions, dial colors, and bands.. What ideas do you have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KingRosales0 -
Duplicate content for hotel websites - the usual nightmare? is there any solution other than producing unique content?
Hiya Mozzers I often work for hotels. A common scenario is the hotel / resort has worked with their Property Management System to distribute their booking availability around the web... to third party booking sites - with the inventory goes duplicate page descriptions sent to these "partner" websites. I was just checking duplication on a room description - 20 loads of duplicate descriptions for that page alone - there are 200 rooms - so I'm probably looking at 4,000 loads of duplicate content that need rewriting to prevent duplicate content penalties, which will cost a huge amount of money. Is there any other solution? Perhaps ask booking sites to block relevant pages from search engines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate Page Content - Shopify
Moz reports that there are 1,600+ pages on my site (Sportiqe.com) that qualify as Duplicate Page Content. The website sells licensed apparel, causing shirts to go into multiple categories (ie - LA Lakers shirts would be categorized in three areas: Men's Shirts, LA Lakers Shirts and NBA Shirts)It looks like "tags" are the primary cause behind the duplicate content issues: // Collection Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts (Preferred URL): http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag): http://sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag, w/o the www.): http://sportiqe.com/collections/all-products/clippers (Different collection, w/ tag and same content)// Blog Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/7902801-dispatch-is-back: http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/tagged/elias-fundWould it make sense to do 301 redirects for the collection tags and use the Parameter Tool in Webmaster Tools to exclude blog post tags from their crawl? Or, is there a possible solution with the rel=cannonical tag?Appreciate any insight from fellow Shopify users and the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | farmiloe0 -
Is this duplicate content something to be concerned about?
On the 20th February a site I work on took a nose-dive for the main terms I target. Unfortunately I can't provide the url for this site. All links have been developed organically so I have ruled this out as something which could've had an impact. During the past 4 months I've cleaned up all WMT errors and applied appropriate redirects wherever applicable. During this process I noticed that mydomainname.net contained identical content to the main mydomainname.com site. Upon discovering this problem I 301 redirected all .net content to the main .com site. Nothing has changed in terms of rankings since doing this about 3 months ago. I also found paragraphs of duplicate content on other sites (competitors in different countries). Although entire pages haven't been copied there is still enough content to highlight similarities. As this content was written from scratch and Google would've seen this within it's crawl and index process I wanted to get peoples thoughts as to whether this is something I should be concerned about? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bfrl0 -
How much (%) of the content of a page is considered too much duplication?
Google is not fond of duplication, I have been very kindly told. So how much would you suggest is too much?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonberenyi0 -
Duplicate Content on Product Pages
I'm getting a lot of duplicate content errors on my ecommerce site www.outdoormegastore.co.uk mainly centered around product pages. The products are completely different in terms of the title, meta data, product descriptions and images (with alt tags)but SEOmoz is still identifying them as duplicates and we've noticed a significant drop in google ranking lately. Admittedly the product descriptions are a little bit thin but I don't understand why the pages would be viewed as duplicates and therefore can be ranked lower? The content is definitely unique too. As an example these three pages have been identified as being duplicates of each other. http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/regatta-landtrek-25l-rucksack.html http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/canyon-bryce-adult-cycling-helmet-9045.html http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/outwell-minnesota-6-carpet-for-green-07-08-tent.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinhoman0