Avoiding Duplicate Content in E-Commerce Product Search/Sorting Results
-
How do you handle sorting on ecommerce sites? Does it look something like this?
For Example:
- example.com/inventory.php
- example.com/inventory.php?category=used
- example.com/inventory.php?category=used&price=high
- example.com/inventory.php?category=used&location=seattle
If not, how would you handle this? If so, would you just include a no-index tag on all sorted pages to avoid duplicate content issues?
Also, how does pagination play into this? Would it be something like this?
For Example:
- example.com/inventory.php?category=used&price=high__
- example.com/inventory.php?category=used&price=high&page=2
- example.com/inventory.php?category=used&price=high&page=3
If not, how would you handle this? If so, would you still include a no-index tag?
Would you include a rel=next/prev tag on these pages in addition to or instead of the no-index tag?
I hope this makes sense. Let me know if you need me to clarify any of this. Thanks in advance for your help!
-
Thanks everyone, for the feedback!
Dr. Pete, as always, you are a tremendous help!! I look forward to reporting back any findings I come up with during implementation.
Thanks again!
-Alex
-
Unfortunately, it does get tricky in those multi-parameter situations. Googe has suggested that you NOT use canonical to solve pagination issues, unless you canonical to a "View All", and that has some restrictions. So, don't use canonical if it covers "page=2", etc.
Adam Audette has a great post on the subject, but it is complex (he just didn't an updated talk at SMX, but I don't have that link offhand yet):
http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494
Basically, you can use canonical and rel=prev/next together:
(1) The canonical tag would point to "?category=used&page=2"
(2) Rel=prev/next should include the "price=high" parameter, and other parameters.
Unfortunately, this makes for tricky code. See the end of this post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
I'm not thrilled with Google's solution, but it does seem to be working. Bing only partially supports rel=prev/next, to complicate matters.
The other option is to use Google Webmaster Tools (and Bing Webmaster Central) parameter handling to inform them of the functions of "price=" and "page=". If you're just trying to prevent problems, that's viable (i.e. you don't have any current issues).
You can also NOINDEX the variants - Google says they don't recommend it anymore, but I still find it does work in some cases. I just wouldn't combine NOINDEX with rel=prev/next/canonical - you can end up with a mess.
-
On my Ecommerce i've just added it in robots.txt
You should be able to do something similar. Below is what I have but I use x-Cart as my ecommerce site.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /printable=Y
Disallow: /js=
Disallow: /sort=
Disallow: /sort_direction=
Disallow: /product.php
Disallow: /home.php?cat=*
Disallow: /catalog/
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /cart.php
Disallow: /help.php
Disallow: /giftcert.php
Disallow: /product.php
Disallow: /orders.php
Disallow: /register.php
Disallow: /icon.php
Disallow: /image.php
Disallow: /error_message.php
Disallow: /offers.php
Disallow: /product_image.php
Sitemap: http://www.domainurlhere.co.uk/sitemap.xml -
I would use rel="canonical" to example.com/inventory.php
on
- example.com/inventory.php?category=used
- example.com/inventory.php?category=used&price=high
- example.com/inventory.php?category=used&location=seattle
This should cover you for pagination : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
-
Regarding pagination - urls look fine and you should use rel=prev/rel=next instead of the no-index tag.
Regarding sorting - Google have a handy little sheet about this which you may or may not have seen that covers this kind of issue
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
-
Shopify Duplicate Content in products
Hello Moz Community, New to Moz and looking forward to beginning my journey towards SEO education and improving our clients' sites. Our client's website is a Shopify store. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/ Our first Moz reports show 686 duplicate content issues. I will show the first 4 as examples. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-teardrop-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-orca-silver-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/silver-oval-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-spirit-silver-earrings As you can see, URL titles are unique. But I know that the content in each of those products have very similar product descriptions but not exactly. But since they have been flagged as a site issue by Moz, I am guessing that the content is 95% duplicate. So can a rel=canonical be the right solution for this type of duplicate content? Or should I be considering adding new content to each of 686 products to drop below the 95% threshold? Or another solution that I may not be aware of. Thanks in advance for your assistance and expertise! Sean
Technical SEO | | TheUpdateCompany1 -
Handling of Duplicate Content
I just recently signed and joined the moz.com system. During the initial report for our web site it shows we have lots of duplicate content. The web site is real estate based and we are loading IDX listings from other brokerages into our site. If though these listings look alike, they are not. Each has their own photos, description and addresses. So why are they appear as duplicates – I would assume that they are all too closely related. Lots for Sale primarily – and it looks like lazy agents have 4 or 5 lots and input the description the same. Unfortunately for us, part of the IDX agreement is that you cannot pick and choose which listings to load and you cannot change the content. You are either all in or you cannot use the system. How should one manage duplicate content like this? Or should we ignore it? Out of 1500+ listings on our web site it shows 40 of them are duplicates.
Technical SEO | | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi there, I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content: We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots? The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great! Thanks very much! George
Technical SEO | | canadageorge0 -
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Avoiding duplication in TLDs
I have started a ecom site with following config global version geekwik.com priced in usd india version geekwik.in priced in inr mostly the content in both sites is same (90% same), major difference is currency (and payment gateway) and helpline numbers etc How do I setup robots.txt and google webmaster so that indian users get results from India TLD and global users get results from global TLD and there is no duplication of content. .
Technical SEO | | geekwik0 -
How to prevent duplicate content in archives?
My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Duplicate Content via a product feed & data
We have uniquely created all of our product content on our website (Titles, product descriptions, images etc). However, we are also a manufacturer of these products and supply to a number of trade customers. These customers often wish to setup their own websites to re-sell these products. In the past we have quite happily given this content in order to assist our customers sell on their sites. Generally we give them a 'data dump' of our web data and images, but reading about duplicate content this will lead to the search engines seeing lots of identical content on these customer sites. Whilst we wish to support our customers we do not want to harm our (and their) site by issuing lots of duplicate content around the web. Is there a way we can help them with the data without penalizing ourselves? The other issue is that we also take this data feed and use it to sell on both Amazon & Googlebase. Will using this identical data also rank as duplicate content as a quick search does show both our website and amazon product page? When creating Amazon listing do these need to vary from the standard website descriptions? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bwfc770 -
Duplicate Content within Website - problem?
Hello everyone, I am currently working on a big site which sells thousands of widgets. However each widget has ten sub widgets (1,2,3... say) My strategy with this site is to target the long tail search so I'm creating static pages for each possibly variation. So I'll have a main product page on widgets in general, and also a page on widget1, page on widget2 etc etc. I'm anticipating that because there's so much competition for searches relating to widgets in general, I'll get most of my traffic from people being more specific and searching for widget1 or widget 7 etc. Now here's the problem - I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget. However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles. So... what do I do with the content. Put it on the main widget page was the plan but what do I do about the sub pages. I could put it there and it would make perfect sense to a reader and be relevant to people specifically looking for widget1, say, but could there be a issue with it being viewed as duplicate content. One idea was to just put a snippet (first 100 words) on each sub page with a link back to the main widget page where the full copy would be. Not sure whether I've made myself clear at all but hopefully I have - or I can clarify. Thanks so much in advance David
Technical SEO | | OzDave0