Stub category pages (dupe warning)
-
Hi
I have a number of highly ranked category pages. However, at times these contain no products for a few weeks, etc.
They are being flagged as duplicate content as they are just stub pages when they have no products, with the same "No products found" message.
I don't want to risk 'noindex' ing the pages though - because as soon as they have products in, they become valuable pages and I would hate to lose a good ranking.
Should I just leave them as-is and ignore the dupe warnings?
-
I think that there is a slightly bigger question here. Rather than "How can I stop Moz flagging these up as duplicate?" you might want to ask "Are these duplicate pages harming me".
Thin pages, particularly those ranking on desirable terms, are something I try hard to avoid. They send pretty poor quality signals to Google and create poor user experience signals as well. If there is a term that I want to rank for I would ensure that pages are strong enough to deserve ranking before letting them get indexed.
It can be painful to deindex a page that ranks. However if those pages are giving off bad signals that could be your best chance of long term ranking success.
A compromise might be to fill them out in the mean time. How effective this might be will really depend on your niche and your website. Lots of stores do this by just adding a load of low value text to the page, but a better approach is to try to put something useful there until the products arrive. Do this right and you could even be building links into those pages before the products arrive.
One example of this that I have done in the past is to build out a great coming soon page that featured a competition to win the item when it launched, As well as ensuring that there was a page worthy of ranking (particularly against the competition who were using stub pages!), it brought some other key advantages:
- The competition was used to build links from related sites
- User experience was great. People hung about, watched the video and filled in the entry form
- It got shared (bonus prize draw entries for sharing!)
- When the product hit the shelves we already had a mailing list of interested customers
That's fairly involved, so won't work for everything, but the principals are sound. If you were Google which would you want to rank? That or an empty page?
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
-
Category VS Post
I use my website for providing an international service, I made my URL structure website https://example.com/destinations/africa/country destinations is a category and Africa is a sub-category I made an article for every continent and inserted all the continent's country manually, the page url structure is https://example.com/destinations/africa/ and the continent category URL is https://example.com/category/destinations/africa/ I'm thinking about removing the continent article and strip the category Word from URL, So i will use the subcategories directly on the same link https://example.com/destinations/africa/ what's your advice about removing the continent article and using the sub categories instead? is it a good idea to use the child category as a reference for the internal links? what do you think about keeping both of them (child category and the Article)? in case you suggest to use the child category , Is removing Category word may hurt my SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | batot_mahmoud0 -
Google Page Speed
Is it worthwhile going after a good score on Google page speed? Had prices but a LOT of money, and don't know if it's worth it or not. Also to add to the complication it is a new site. Does anyone have any experience if it helps rankings? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture. rel= canonical? Any help would be great!! http://www.southernwhitewater.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Google+ Page Question
Just started some work for a new client, I created a Google+ page and a connected YouTube page, then proceeded to claim a listing for them on google places for business which automatically created another Google+ page for the business listing. What do I do in this situation? Do I delete the YouTube page and Google+ page that I originally made and then recreate them using the Google+ page that was automatically created or do I just keep both pages going? If the latter is the case, do I use the same information to populate both pages and post the same content to both pages? That doesn't seem like it would be efficient or the right way to go about handling this but I could be wrong.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
On-page optimization - Am I doing it well?
Hi Mozzers, I'm sitting here going through our site and optimizing all of our content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
For the most part we've just written without correct keyword research, so the content lacks focus. Here is a page I would consider finished - http://www.consumerbase.com/international-mailing-lists.html I have our KWs in the: URL Title Tag Meta Description Bolded in Content Image Alt Attribute. If I optimize my other pages like this, will I be good?
It feels a tiny bit stuffed to me, but SEOmoz's on-page tool gives me glowing numbers. Thanks!0 -
Rel canonical on every page, pointing to home page
I've just started working with a client and have been surprised to find that every page of their site (using Concrete5 CMS) has a rel=canonical pointing to their home page. I'm feeling really dumb, because this seems like a fatal flaw which would keep Google from ranking any page other than the home page... but when I look at Google Analytics, Content > Site Content > Landing Pages, using Secondary Dimension = Source, it seems that Google is delivering users to numerous pages on their site. Can anyone help me out?! Thanks very much!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | measurableROI0 -
Is there a negative effect to show categories and products on the same page?
I mean having say 5 different categories on a page and showing the products that are in those categories below the categories. Just In case people don't want to dig deeper to find there product because they know what they need already. I would also want those categories for the people that need to do a little more searching and have a better reference guide. So is there any negatives to my SEO doing it that way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Pages that were ranking now are not?
Hi Folks Noticed something strange just now pages that were ranking on position 10 on Google for searches such as 'ufc trainer kinect best price' at the start of this week are no longer ranking? Is what has happened to the site the famous google dance or sandbox effect as the site only officially went live on Monday If this is the case what is the recommended course of action to get back ranking competitively again? as I have no idea on what has gone wrong as I has always tried to follow best practice from these forums and the SEOMOZ and YOUMOZ articles My site is www.cheapfindergames.com Many Thanks Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0