This Rookie needs help! Duplicate content pages dropped significantly.
-
So I am pretty new to SEO Moz. I have an e-commerce site and recently did a website redesign. However, not without several mistakes and issues. That said, when SEO Moz did a crawl of my site, the results showed A LOT of Duplicate Content Pages on my site due to my having one item in many variations. It was almost over whelming and because the number of pages was so high, I have been trying to research ways to correct it quickly. The latest crawl from yesterday shows a drastic drop in the number of duplicate content pages and a slight increase in pages with too long page titles (which is fixable). I am embarrassed to give the number of duplicate pages that were showing but, just know, it's been reduced to a third of the amount.
I am just wondering if I missed something and should I be happy or concerned? Has there been a change that could have caused this? Thanks for helping this rookie out!
-
OH BOY! You're going to have to let me read through this a time or two and get back to you! I think I get it but I need to digest a bit of this canonical stuff that I keep avoiding.
Thank you so much. I'll get back.
-
I would strongly consider using the rel=canonical tags on your pages. If you have 1 main product 20 variations in color and 3 different image prints as well then here is what I would do.
Find the most popular of the 20 variations in color and utilize the rel=canonical for the 19 other pages to point back to that most popular page. Dont worry about changing copy or anything drastically for this.
Now lets assume that the three different images are a disney print chair, a LOTR print chair and a Pixar Print Chair. You believe that people might actually be searching for these 3 products in a different way than your other 20. You should then try to create unique content for all 3 of these pages that differ from not only the other 20 color variations but also each of the other image print chairs. To make sure it is different I would not scrape any content from the other pages and re-purpose it but rather write 3 new descriptions and pages, Header Tags, Title Tags, Alt Tags, etc...
Now a best practice would still be to utilize a rel=canonical tag on all of your pages so that tracking parameters and the such do not end up getting linked to and you end up splitting your authority among different pages in the SERP. For a good source on rel=canonical I would look here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Hope this helps and isn't too confusing. -
No problem, good luck with your website
-
I do not need to necessarily rank for every fabric. There are a few such as Disney characters or sports teams that I do need to rank for. My previous site had all the chairs on one page with a drop down and it just was not as "simple" to shop the item and it made specific tracking and "book keeping" a little more difficult. I like to have zoomed and multiple views for each chair when possible. I find this reduces the number of returns and customer inquiries when the customer can really see each product.
So, giving each product it's own page is for two reasons - the customer's shopping experience and for my tracking purposes.
As for the meta tags- I think your quote above is possibly one issue. The programming on my site automatically generates the meta tag based upon my product description.
By the way, Thank you for your time and expertise.
-
Do you need to rank on every fabric name for your product ? If not, you could just put one product page and have the fabric choice in a dropdown menu.
And for the meta description, allow me to quote SEOmoz Beginners guide to SEO : "Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines)".
-
Thank you Aeronet. I think most of my issues are within the description. Example: I may have a kids recliner in 50 different fabric choices. So the url, title, meta tag, and product name are all unique. However, the description is practically the same for each chair. You have given me a couple things to look into though such as the written/unwritten url. New to me but I will look into it as well as double check some other things.
When my newly designed site was released, I was unaware that the new program would generate a URL for each page based upon my product ID and not the established URL that I assigned it. Therefore all of my previous, 5 yr old and hard worked, URL's vanished. I did not discover this for 25 days and had to do a 301 redirect on a large chunk of my site. It's been quite a mess.
The number of duplicate content pages have been overwhelming, but I was just shocked to see the number suddenly drop to a 3rd of what it was yesterday. Still not sure what has happened to cause this.
-
If you use only one item in many variations (and want to keep your website that way), you must find ways to make each page as unique as possible.
You should look at :
- The url.
- The title.
- The meta description.
- The product name and description.
- The product image name and alt attribute.
- The breadcrumb trail.
And try to customize them to make each product page unique.
Also check if a page is reachable with differents urls, if your product is reachable by its rewritten and non rewritten url, that could cause the duplicated pages problem on your website.
(For example, www.yourwebsite.com/product.php?id=02 and www.yourwebsite.com/shiny-rewritten-product-url)
If that's the case, use rel=canonical or 301 redirect to your rewritten URLs, make a sitemap with the latest ones and your duplicate pages number should go down.
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
-
Dynamic contents causes duplicate pages
Technical help required - please!
Moz Pro | | GBCweb
In our Duplicate Content Pages Report I see a lot of duplicate pages that are created by one URL plus several versions of the same page with the dynamic content, for example,
http://www.georgebrown.ca/immigranteducation/programs
http://www.georgebrown.ca/school-program.aspx?id=1909&Sortid=Study
http://www.georgebrown.ca/school-program.aspx?id=1909&Sortid=Term
http://www.georgebrown.ca/school-program.aspx?id=1909&Sortid=Certification
http://www.georgebrown.ca/school-program.aspx?id=1909&Sortid=Title How do we solve it?0 -
URL Parameters causing duplicate content - Login/Registration page
All, I just recently acquired a new client and right away I noticed an abundance of duplicate content being recorded after the moz crawl diagnostics was completed. After a quick digest of the issue, it seems that the majority (90%) of the outlined duplicated content is stemming from the client's Login/Registration page. Upon clicking (without being logged-in) any asset or forum discussion board link within the site, the user is automatically redirected to the Login/Registration page, which seems to create this massive redirect loop associated with dynamic url parameters. Ex. After clicking on a select internal link (asset or discussion board) the user is redirected to the Login/Register page which presents the page and a URL that looks a lot this this: Ex. 1 https://www.clientsite.com/register-login?ReturnUr...xxxx%xxxx%xxxx%...... Ex. 2 https://www.clientsite.com**/register-login?returnurl=/register-login?returnurl=/register-login?returnurl=/page-titl**e/ These URLs seem to becoming larger and larger... The client wants to ensure users have to Login/Register within their site before they're allowed to view the content. This process doesn't allow for any type of preview page to be viewed by a user prior to clicking on the internal link, which in turn doesn't allow any preview pages to be indexed. Right now, Moz is picking up all of the redirect and labeling them as duplicate page content/duplicate page titles based on the Login/Registration page. Questions/Comments: Would it be wise to create preview pages for the asset pages and discussion board pages to allow for proper indexing? - Could this be a CMS issue? Current being used on this is, Kentico. There are thousands of pages being recorded in the crawl as duplicate, however only 14 seem to be indexing with duplicate title tags. 301 or canonical redirect strategy? Moz crawl data issue? Again, this is my first look at this issue, so more information is bound to come out soon! Please let me know if anyone has run into this issue and if you have a possible solution to get rid of this redirect loop process. Thanks! -T
Moz Pro | | MattLacuesta0 -
SEOmoz giving duplicate content that does not exist.
My problem is similar, and SEOmoz add campaign is giving me several pag. Duplicate, and he's giving me links pag. That do not exist. Look below. My site has 115 pages and the extent SEMOZ gave me 250. Duplicate Page Content ... pages / Alexandra / Clarisse / Clarisse.html
Moz Pro | | Slash-RJ
... pages / Alexandra / Clarisse / Clarisse / Clarisse.html
... pages / Alexandra / Clarisse / Clarisse / Clarisse / Clarisse.html
.... pages / Alexandra / Clarisse / Clarisse / Clarisse / Lizie / Lizie.html When the verade this link does not exist, there is only. ... pages / Alexandra / Alexandra.html
... pages / Clarisse / Clarissehtml
And so on. How to Solve?0 -
Benefits of reducing on page links
This is more of a discussion point. What would be the measurable results of reducing the number of on page links, specifically on a home page, but let's assume by way of a large navigation menu most of the pages have a lot of links" For instance, would any of the stats on the MozBar be affected (let's start with the home page). Would the Page Authority or MozRank change at all, perhaps because there is less "juice" flowing out of the home page? Thanks! 🙂
Moz Pro | | ntcma0 -
Domain.com and domain.com/index.html duplicate content in reports even with rewrite on
I have a site that was recently hit by the Google penguin update and dropped a page back. When running the site through seomoz tools, I keep getting duplicate content in the reports for domain.com and domain.com/index.html, even though I have a 301 rewrite condition. When I test the site, domain.com/index.html redirects to domain.com for all directories and root. I don't understand how my index page can still get flagged as duplicate content. I also have a redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com. Is there anything else I need to do or add to my htaccess file? Appreciate any clarification on this.
Moz Pro | | anthonytjm0 -
Help with various bit?
Hi again, Right I have wrote some notes on what I have read on here, the web and from my diagnostics. Our site is a e-commerce site for mens designer clothing. All back end editing has to be done by the web firm who host it. We can edit CMS stuff such as SEO title, descriptions, product info etc... Any help or clarification would be greatly beneficial, right lets go (sorry about the long read). <70 title characters, this is something I am going to implement on the back of some advice on here. Does it matter what order words appear in the title? Eg) Mens Blue Armani Jeans Jacket or Blue Armani Jeans Mens Jacket. Would it really matter? Is it good practice or worthwhile to use seo titles with the colour of the item at the front? I ask this as I am not sure if we would be affected by starting the first few words of each title with the brand name. eg) Blue Armani Jeans, Red Armani Jeans as opposed to Armani Jeans in Blue, Armani Jeans in Red? SEO title still, should I just include what that item is and nothing else? Or does adding something else at the end go against you? eg) Blue Armani Jeans as opposed to Blue Armani Jeans | Mens Armani Jeans UK? Am I trying too hard to get relevant words in there? Our meta descriptions are about 170-220 characters long for each item/page, is this too much? Sometimes struggle with the uniqueness of descriptions, as we can have loads of the same item, but only the colour is different. So after 5 go's, words get harder to put together. What % of a description do you think needs to be unique? Next is what comes from the crawl diagnostics Duplicate Page Titles: We are being warned because each page is showing up with a sort applied to it or pages that no longer exist. We also have filters for product types, so we show as dups for say all-clothing/armani-jeans/ has the same SEO features as shirts/armani-jeans/ and say jeans-trousers/armani-jeans/. I don't have the ability to SEO the filtered titles in the CMS. How would I fix this? Long URL: How important is the length of the URL? I make sure the URL is what the item is eg) armani-jeans-mens-jacket-6A554. The number at the end is the items style number. Should I always keep the URL as short as possible? And how far over the 115 is acceptable as for some items were only 1-10 characters over and its hard to go shorter? No. of links per page: Due to being an e-commerce site, pages such as TOPS could have over 100 products easy, not to mention the links in navigation etc... How important is this? Rel Cononical: We have 2,591 of these. What are they, how can I fix it? It is important? H1 tags: Should these be put on keyword phrases on each brands page? Should it go on the homepage only? How many H1 tags on a site/page can you have? I can't go back end code so webfirm would have to edit. Howver in CMS I can H1 product decriptions and brand descriptions, would that be useful? Keywords within the CMS, how useful are these? They are becoming a pain to do, so I don't want to do them if I dont have to. How many would be too many? Product On Page Descriptions: How long should these be? Does it matter if its a bullet list of features? Or should it just be 2-3 lines of what the item is, features etc...? Sorry for the long essay, just my notes from the last few days. Thanks Will ps. if you want to view the site its www.designerboutique-online.com
Moz Pro | | YNWA0 -
How to remove Duplicate content due to url parameters from SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostics
Hello all I'm currently getting back over 8000 crawl errors for duplicate content pages . Its a joomla site with virtuemart and 95% of the errors are for parameters in the url that the customer can use to filter products. Google is handling them fine under webmaster tools parameters but its pretty hard to find the other duplicate content issues in SEOMoz with all of these in the way. All of the problem parameters start with ?product_type_ Should i try and use the robot.txt to stop them from being crawled and if so what would be the best way to include them in the robot.txt Any help greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | dfeg0 -
Duplicate page error from SEOmoz
SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnostics is complaining about a duplicate page error. I'm trying to use a rel=canonical but maybe I'm not doing it right. This page is the original, definitive version of the content: https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-newsletter/sent-2011-10-01 This page is an alias that points to it (each month the alias is changed to point to the then current issue): https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-newsletter/latest-issue The alias page above contains this tag (which is also updated each month when a new issue comes out) in the section: Is that not correct? Is the https (vs http) messing something up? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | scanlin0