E-Commerce Duplicate Content
-
Hello all
We have an e-commerce website with approximately 3,000 products. Many of the products are displayed in multiple categories which in turn generates a different URL!
Accross the entire site I have noticed that the product pages are always outranked by competitors who have lower page authority, domain authority, total links etc etc.
I am convinced this is down to duplicate content issues. I understand there is no direct penalty but how would this affect our rankings? Is page rank split between all the duplicates, which in turn lowers it's ranking potential?
I have looked for a way to identify duplicate content using Google analytics but i've been unsuccessful. If the duplicate content is the issue and page rank is divided am i best using canonical or 301 redirects?
Sorry if this is an obvious question but If i'm correct we could see a huge improvement in rankings accross the board. Wow!
Cheers
Todd
-
When Google finds more than one document (ie URL) with the same content, it has to define which of them is the representative document of the cluster. In doing this it looks at inbound link metrics, essentially, plus date of the page, pagerank and other factors. In this decision, it can be wrong, indexing a page that can hurt you indexation (consider this situation: it indexes as representative document page 2 of a listing page in descending order: new items in this category end to be at page 2 or later and are less likely to be discovered).
The canonical tag can be a good solution, even if it is a hint and not a rule to Google...
-
Great stuff thanks!...
-
SEOMOZ had an awesome whiteboard on this.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation
Some more additional resources:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dealing-with-faceted-navigation-a-case-study
Matt Cutts on faceted navigation:
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml
Hope they help you
-
Thanks again! Unfortunately our system was built in house from scratch with no consideration for duplicate content
To be honest the product pages that I'm worried about have very few or no inbound links so maybe this isn't such a huge issue.
I have picked up on the fact almost all our pages including the homepage work on www and non www so maybe creating a 301 redirect for these will help also.
I will test the conical tag on a range of pages and mointor the results, hopefully our rankings will increase and I can look at some kind of strategy to roll this out.
Cheers for the help!
-
Google will select the most authortive aka whichever has the most links.
If you have a ton of inbound links I would recommend doing lots of research before inserting that tag. Find out which pages have the authority and don't throw it away.
This was a plague of eCommerce for years. Luckly most of the newest moden platfroms have caught up.
-
The duplicate item pages will not be indexed but visited the google bot. He will consider this page to be the one linked in the canonical tag.
I hope you won't have to set the urls manually !
-
Thanks for the quick response chaps! So if we have 9 duplicates for example will Google index all 9 pages or decide on 1 and never revisit the rest.
I couldn't see any duplicate URLs in the top content report.
We have over 3,000 products so it will be fun adding canonical tags to all the necessary pages
-
Toddy,
For every product of your site, you should identify its main category (the one that will be indexed). When seeing a product with a different category url, use the rel=canonical tag to give google the good url. This works well with e-commerce site.
You may also apply this logic between categories, as some listing between two categories are sometimes very similar.
For more information about the rel=canonical tag, see these resources :
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
-
The only "penalty" is the fact you could potentially spread your link juice across those multiple pages. Example:
You have 104 links to the same product, but they are equally pointed a 4 unique URLs. Now you technically have 26 links on whatever page Google 'selects' as your authority page.
Your competition has 100 links to the same product which only has 1 page.
With that type of setup your competition is always going to have that authority page ranked abouve you.
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
-
Purchasing duplicate content
Morning all, I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well. I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | BackPack851 -
Duplicate content for vehicle inventory.
Hey all, In the automotive industry... When uploading vehicle inventory to a website I'm concerned with duplicate content issues. For example, 1 vehicle is uploaded to the main manufacturers website, then again to the actual dealerships website & then again to Craigslist & even sometimes to a group site. The information is all the same, description, notes, car details & images. What would you all recommend for alleviating duplicate content issues? Should I be using the rel canonical back to the manufacturers website? Once the vehicle is sold all pages disappear. Thanks so much for any advice.
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Tips and duplicate content
Hello, we have a search site that offers tips to help with search/find. These tips are organized on the site in xml format with commas... of course the search parameters are duplicated in the xml so that we have a number of tips for each search parameter. For example if the parameter is "dining room" we might have 35 pieces of advice - all less than a tweet long. My question - will I be penalized for keyword stuffing - how can I avoid this?
Technical SEO | | acraigi0 -
Showing duplicate content when I have canonical url set, why?
Just inspecting my sites report and I see that I have a lot of duplicate content issues, not sure why these two pages here http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/small-wholesale-patches-1/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch are showing as duplicate content when both pages have a clearly defined canonical url of http://www.thecheapplace.com/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch Any answer would be appreciated, thank you
Technical SEO | | erhansimavi0 -
Duplicate Page Content for sorted archives?
Experienced backend dev, but SEO newbie here 🙂 When SEOmoz crawls my site, I get notified of DPC errors on some list/archive sorted pages (appending ?sort=X to the url). The pages all have rel=canonical to the archive home. Some of the pages are shorter (have only one or two entries). Is there a way to resolve this error? Perhaps add rel=nofollow to the sorting menu? Or perhaps find a method that utilizes a non-link navigation method to sort / switch sorted pages? No issues with duplicate content are showing up on google webmaster tools. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | jwondrusch0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
Hi All, I am getting warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Does it really affect my site?. I am using wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Duplicate Content on Product Pages
Hello I'm currently working on two sites and I had some general question's about duplicate content. For the first one each page is a different location, but the wording is identical on each; ie it says Instant Remote Support for Critical Issues, Same Day Onsite Support with a 3-4 hour response time, etc. Would I get penalized for this? Another question i have is, we offer Antivirus support for providers ie Norton, AVG,Bit Defender etc. I was wondering if we will get penalized for having the same first paragraph with only changing the name of the virus provider on each page? My last question is we provide services for multiple city's and towns in various states. Will I get penalized for having the same content on each page, such as towns and producuts and services we provide? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ilyaelbert0 -
Solution for duplicate content not working
I'm getting a duplicate content error for: http://www.website.com http://www.website.com/default.htm I searched for the Q&A for the solution and found: Access the.htaccess file and add this line: redirect 301 /default.htm http://www.website.com I added the redirect to my .htaccess and then got the following error from Google when trying to access the http://www.website.com/default.htm page: "This webpage has a redirect loop
Technical SEO | | Joeuspe
The webpage at http://www.webpage.com/ has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer." "Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects." How can I correct this? Thanks0