Many items with similar descriptions showing up as duplicate page titles
-
Hi,
We are just a small company trying to understand this seo business. :O) I hope you will give us your input on how we look and how we can improve.
Each week I go down the seomoz crawl and change the duplicate page titles it increases the duplicate page content. Then the next week it seems to find other titles that have been fixed that are afluwie now. Please help. We are a bead company and alot of our products have a similar description but have different colors and items numbers. Could you please advise me on how to fix these errors and increase our ranking?
All the Best,
Beth
-
Thank you for the info. We are just learning and testing using the language of seo. Your answers have supported the direction we felt we needed to go but wanted a second opinion from someone who understood the whole picture. All the Best... Beth
-
Canonical is most effective in reducing the number of pages indexed. Doesn't address any issues related to unique content to the degree you need to add a lot more unique content to each page you do want indexed.
-
Thank you very much for responding to our question... I was afraid you might say that... is there not a way we could use the famous "canonical" (crossed fingers) to help?
-
Beth,
Unfortunately when you've got a lot of products where the only difference between SKUs is color and item number, it means you need to artificially implement uniqueness. This requires becoming creative with product names and descriptions. Since I see you've already got product names covered fairly well, let's talk about descriptions.
If you go to a sample page, such as for the Charlotte Cut Beads, look at the page both from a "length of description" aspect as well as an "overall content" aspect.
That very short description is quite likely to be seen as at least partly, if not mostly duplicate from other descriptions on the site. And at the same time, the total weight of unique content compared the the entirety of the page (with the header, side navigation and footer being replicated across many pages on the site) and you have a bigger problem in hoping to get this designated as a unique page.
Even though it may seem like a burden to have to produce paragraphs of content for a single product page, without that extended unique description for every product, you'll always have problems.
You may be better off changing how your site works than trying to struggle with the current issues.
For example, when I go to the Charlotte Cuts category page, maybe you should have this be the single page people go to so they can choose which products to add to their cart - eliminating the final individual product "details" page (since there really are no "details" on those.
Then, I'd recommend adding a couple paragraphs of well written and optimized content for that category 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
-
Duplicates - How to know if trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages?
Hi, How do you determine whether trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages? Search Console is showing both /about and about/ for example but how do I know whether this is a problem? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Is any code to prevent duplicate meta description on blog pages
Is any code to prevent duplicate meta description on blog pages I use rell canonical on blog page and to prevent duplicate title y use on page category title de code %%page%% Is there any similar code so to description?
Technical SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
How do I deal with my pages being seen as duplicate content by SeoMoz?
My Dashboard is giving my lots of warnings for duplicate content but it all seems to have something to do with the www and the slash / For example: http://www.ebow.ie/ is seen as having the same duplicate content as http:/ebow.ie/ and http://www.ebow.ie Alos lots to do with how Wordpress categorizes pages and tags that is driving me bonkers! Any help appreciated! Dave. seomoz.png
Technical SEO | | ebowdublin0 -
A week ago I asked how to remove duplicate files and duplicate titles
Three weeks ago we had a very large number of site errors revealed by crawl diagostics. These errors related purely to the presence of both http://domain name and http://www.domain name. We used the rel canonical tag in the head of our index page to direct all to the www. preference, and we have no improvement. Matters got worse two weeks ago and I checked with Google Webmaster and found that Google had somehow lost our preference choice. A week ago I asked how to overcome this problem and received good advice about how to re-enter our preference for the www.tag with Google. This we did and it was accepted. We aso submitted a new sitemap.xml which was also acceptable to Google. Today, a week later we find that we have even more duplicate content (over 10,000 duplicate errors) showing up in the latest diagnostic crawl. Does anyone have any ideas? (Getting a bit desperate.)
Technical SEO | | FFTCOUK0 -
Should I add my brand name to every page title
Currently for every page I automatically add my brand name Ie: poduct xxx - brand name product yyy - brand name. is this considered good or bad practice?
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
How to resolve duplicate content and title errors?
Hello, I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand. My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages. A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle. So my question: Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Duplicate Page Title
The crawl of my website http://www.aboutaburningfire.com revealed an error showing a duplicate page title. Can someone please explain to me how to fix this? I'm not sure what it means or how to fix it. | House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/ 1 Pending Pending House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/index.html |
Technical SEO | | severity0