How get rid of duplicate content, titles, etc on php cartweaver site?
-
my website http://www.bartramgallery.com was created using php and cartweaver 2.0 about five years ago by a web developer. I was really happy with the results of the design was inspired to get into web development and have been studying ever since. My biggest problem at this time is that I am not knowledgable with php and the cartweaver product but am learning as I read more. The issue is that seomoz tools are reporting tons of duplicate content and duplicate title pages etc. This is likely from the dynamic urls and same pages with secondary results etc. I just made a new sitemap with auditmypc I think it was called in an attempt to get rid of all the duplicate page titles but is that going to solve anything or do I need to find another way to configure the site? There are many pages with the same content competing for page rank and it is a bit frustrating to say the least. If anyone has any advice it would be greatly appreciated even pointing me in the right direction.
Thank you,
Jesse
-
I am still researching a bunch of sites trying to figure out a way to get the product ID name at the end which would be great as that is the page title. I just thought I would mention that I am working on it and see if you thought that it was not possible as you mentioned due to Cartweaver's limitations. It's funny that I have spent so much time trying to get my urls to show up how they should... seems this could have been configured into the original product. Beggars can't be choosers.
-
Yes I am going to take a look at that when I get home perhaps I have to change how a few things are referenced as well as create the change of address right? because if you type in the normal dynamic nasty url it still goes to the nasty url but if I select the url and paste it.. it brings up the page as I mentioned above. Basically stripped of images and styling.
I am wondering if it is possible to include that number at the end as it is the actual image and could potentially populate the title of the image at the end which would be sweet. Of course then I would have a new problem of too long of an url as I have the titles pretty keyword rich on a lot of them to make a proper title for the page.
If this all works out I have to create a link to your site at cartweaver and from a couple of my sites as you have been a great help and from what I can tell have been able to properly diagnose a fairly complex issue with php and cartweaver and even if some web page that I have not seen something similar enough you have been a great help. Thank you
-
I'm guessing the paths used to reference the images & css files are relative to the the results.php file.. now that there are "/"s the best thing to do is to change the template to either hard code an absolute path or use forward slash at the start to always start at the root.. eg
Old code:
New code
or
-
I tried the test example you did above and it was pretty cool. With the web address http://www.bartramgallery.com/photographer/charles-cramer/10.php it rendered a page with I believe everything except for design and styles as well as any imagery. Not sure what causes that to occur perhaps it is missing something but that was a pretty quick stab at fixing my url issue. I am too tired now and need to go to bed haha. Thanks
-
No worries Look forward to seeing the site with the new URLs in place - a lot of great photos on that site that need to be shared with everyone
-
Yes it appears that this is a pretty good task to clean up this url issue but well worth it. I was surprised by the system moderators of Cartweaver discounting the url as if it were not important because they are very good developers however I think that the url is much more important than some realize as they are both keyword rich and more interesting to the customer. I am even less likely to click on some random url that has no meaning then if I saw one that clearly spelled out what the page was about.. Thanks Woj I am humbled and realize I have some studying to do.
-
There are 2 issues here:
-
Need to fix the URLs for better user experience & search engines and can do so by using rewrite rules in htaccess
The one suggested by the support forum (I've modified to better match your site but it's untested):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^photographer/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([0-9]+).php$ results.php?category=$2 The URLs would then be:
http://www.bartramgallery.com/photographer/charles-cramer/10.php (not ideal with "/10.php" at the end but may be best given the limitations of the cart)
rewrites to: http://www.bartramgallery.com/results.php?category=10 -
Clean up the Google index (remove old URLs & add new ones)
Since both URLs will render the same content we can fix by adding a
tag - attributing 1 source to the duplicate content - check if you can do this dynamically in the templates but be very careful not to canonical everything to the homepage or all your pages will be wiped out the index except the home page!)
-
-
when I read it it seems that the .htaccess was the way to go in that you can have the links appear to google as the old links but in presentation to the customer and keywords the new url would be used. The only thing I was confused about was that it seemed that it would not be good to do redirects but rewrites rather... or is it saying to do both?
-
Thanks
-
Great answer Woj!
-
My pleasure If you set up redirects, you shouldn't loose any traffic
This can also be controlled via htaccess
In google, search for this "site:bartramgallery.com" (without the double quotes) & you will see all the pages you need to redirect
I see the Charles Cramer page as the first photographers page that comes up & the redirect would be something as simple as:
Redirect 301 /results.php?category=10 http://www.bartramgallery.com/charles-cramer
-
Thank you Woj for taking the time to look at my site and I like that organization method. I was not aware of the possibility of being able to reorganize my site like that. I will definately have to research and study a bit to be able to approach this and for awhile I will probably lose traffic but in the end after the changes it should be a much better foot going forward.
-
I'm not familiar with Cartweaver but these are just guides..
First define an organised URL structure - on bartramgallery.com, at a quick glance, a good one could be:
-
bartramgallery.com/photographer (e.g. bartramgallery.com/gordon-michael)
-
bartramgallery.com/photographer/photo (e.g. bartramgallery.com/gordon-michael/juniper-study-joshua-tree)
OR
bartramgallery.com/landscape-photography/photo (e.g. bartramgallery.com/landscape-photography/juniper-study-joshua-tree)
Keep in mind that the shorter URLs the better (could even have bartramgallery.com/photography/juniper-study-joshua-tree)
Second, rewrite the URLs using Rewrite Rules in the htaccess file (see this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rewriterule-split-personality-explained)
I did a search on the Cartweaver support forums and found this:
http://forums.cartweaver.com/topic/google-analytics-identifying-products-and-categoriesOli, from the Cartweaver Support Team, seems to suggest the same "untested" approach as above
Let me know if you need any further help
-
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
-
Part of my site does not show the correct Meta title
Hi our website meta title on the directory section is showing the same title, it does not show the page title. We have tried turning off all plugins, reinstalling the theme, creating a new htacces file. installing Yoast, and testing with All in one seo but still the same thing happens. Tried different themes with the same results But when we test with Twenty Thirteen it is ok Completely lost and would love some help Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Content Aggregation Site: How much content per aggregated piece is too much?
Let's say I set up a section of my website that aggregated content from major news outlets and bloggers around a certain topic. For each piece of aggregated content, is there a bad, fair, and good range of word count that should be stipulated? I'm asking this because I've been mulling it over—both SEO (duplicate content) issues and copyright issues—to determine what is considered best practice. Any ideas about what is considered best practice in this situation? Also, are there any other issues to consider that I didn't mention?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
SEO effect of content duplication across hub of sites
Hello, I have a question about a website I have been asked to work on. It is for a real estate company which is part of a larger company. Along with several other (rival) companies it has a website of property listings which receives a feed of properties from a central hub site - so lots of potential for page, title and meta content duplication (if if isn't already occuring) across the whole network of sites. In early investigation I don't see any of these sites ranking very well at all in Google for expected search phrases. Before I start working on things that might improve their rankings, I wanted to ask some questions from you guys: 1. How would such duplication (if it is occuring) effect the SEO rankings of such sites individually, or the whole network/hub collectively? 2. Is it possible to tell if such a site has been "burnt" for SEO purposes, especially if or from any duplication? 3. If such a site or the network has been totally burnt, are there any approaches or remedies that can be made to improve the site's SEO rankings significantly, or is the only/best option to start again from scratch with a brand new site, ensuring the use of new meta descriptions and unique content? Thanks in advance, Graham
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gmwhite9991 -
Duplicate content based on filters
Hi Community, There have probably been a few answers to this and I have more or less made up my mind about it but would like to pose the question or as that you post a link to the correct article for this please. I have a travel site with multiple accommodations (for example), obviously there are many filter to try find exactly what you want, youcan sort by region, city, rating, price, type of accommodation (hotel, guest house, etc.). This all leads to one invevitable conclusion, many of the results would be the same. My question is how would you handle this? Via a rel canonical to the main categories (such as region or town) thus making it the successor, or no follow all the sub-category pages, thereby not allowing any search to reach deeper in. Thanks for the time and effort.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
How do I use public content without being penalized for duplication?
The NHTSA produces a list of all recalls for automobiles. In their "terms of use" it states that the information can be copied. I want to add that to our site, so there is an up-to-date list for our audience to see. However, I'm just copying and pasting. I'm allowed to according to NHTSA, but google will probably flag it right? Is there a way to do this without being penalized? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Where is the best place to put a sitemap for a site with local content?
I have a simple site that has cities as subdirectories (so URL is root/cityname). All of my content is localized for the city. My "root" page simply links to other cities. I very specifically want to rank for "topic" pages for each city and I'm trying to figure out where to put the sitemap so Google crawls everything most efficiently. I'm debating the following options, which one is better? Put the sitemap on the footer of "root" and link to all popular pages across cities. The advantage here is obviously that the links are one less click away from root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" (e.g. root/cityname) and include all topics for that city. This is how Yelp does it. The advantage here is that the content is "localized" but the disadvantage is it's further away from the root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" and include all topics across all cities. That way wherever Google comes into the site they'll be close to all topics I want to rank for. Thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Duplicate titles and descriptions problem?
We had an old site that used the urls for items site.com/32423432 we changed that to site.com/item name The old stuff has gone away and we have 301 redirects up. For some reason we are getting hit with duplicate titles on those pages and duplicate meta tags. The site relaunch was in November and we have a had a few problems but this just started showing up in the last week after having gone down. Any thoughts on a fix?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on an ecommerce site
Hi all, I have an ecommerce site which has a standard block of text on 98% of the product pages. The site also has a blog. Because these cause duplicate content and duplicate title issues respectively, how can I ever get around this? Would having the standard text on the product pages displayed as an image help? And how can I stop the blog being listed as duplicate titles without a nofollow? We already have the canonical attribute applied to some areas where this is appropriate e.g. blog and product categories. Thanks for your help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMoore850