Is it worth De-duplicating a large e-commerce website?
-
Hi all,
Most e-commerce websites use the same product description as the manufacturers. We know duplicate content is a huge negative for SEO. We are thinking about de-duplicating ours but our website is so big - it has tens of thousands of products. To de-duplicate it would require a ton of resources. Do you think it's worth it to go ahead de-duplicate our website? Do you have a website where de-duplication was done and did you see any positive result? (if so, did you see a certain percentage increase?)
Thank you in advance
-
Hi Marie,
Thank you for responding. I'd be happy to share it with you if we do see a positive result.
-
Hi Matthew,
Thank you for your suggestion.
From what I can see on our analytics, the product detail page, which is the page with the duplicate description, isn't getting any organic traffic. The page is indexed but it's just not ranking. Other websites including manufacturer is out ranking it.
Good suggestion, we are planning on doing the top 250 SKUs and hopefully we'll get some positive result.
On the websites that you've worked on, did you see an increase after you de-duplicate it? The reason why I'm asking is because I'm being asked by higher ups of what kind of percentage increase should we expect from this. I have no answer for it but they want a ball park answer, e.g., 10% or 20% increase.
-
Ok mate. You are in trouble and there is no shortcut. Sorry I am going to disagree. You must have unique content in your page and there is no two ways about it. If you are still getting visitors even after harbouring duplicate content, you should thank your lucky star.
_Now, why not start generating unique content rather than wasting your time looking at the size of the complexity. _
-
I was going to respond to this however Mathew and Marie are spot on. First order of business is to check positioning for your products to see if you are being marginalized behind other pages with the same descriptions. (While youre in there check the pages Page Authority and backlinks to compare to yours as well). Check to see how many of your product pages are indexed. You can also do a litmus test on a few products by adding unique descriptions and waiting to see if there is improvement.
-
Matthew's got good advice for you. I have a few thoughts to add.
How well are you ranking for these products right now? Anywhere near the top? If not, it's worth a try. And I really like the idea of trying it with a small sample first and seeing if your rankings improve.
I wanted to share with you about a real estate site I work with. In real estate almost every realtor uses the MLS listing description for each listing. This means there is a lot of duplication going on. For our listings we create a unique description and title for each listing and we usually end up ranking #1 for address searches for these listings.
If you do de-duplicate and see an improvement I would love to write about your site on my blog as it would probably be considered a Panda recovery of sorts. Let me know!
-
I agree with Mathhew. completely. Test it on a small scale, there are so many other metrics that influence the rankings that it's best to test it and if it works, do it on a larger scale. Quoted from Mathhew's response "Another way to approach this would be to take a sample of ~50 products that get some traffic from search right now. Take unique pictures and write unique content for those products. Then, measure the results. Did organic traffic increase after 30, 60, 90 days? If so, you know that you've got a problem with duplicate content worth correcting."
-
How much traffic do you get to those duplicated pages right now from Google/Bing? Are all of those pages indexed? Can you tell if you are losing out to the manufacturer websites? If the pages are indexed, you are getting traffic, and seem to be "beating" the manufacturer's website, I wouldn't worry too much. On sites I've worked on, I've seen duplicated pages get no traffic (or only one page gets traffic, but not all pages) or they get some traffic but the manufacturer's website ranks considerably higher. That is when you know you have a problem worth correcting. Another way to approach this would be to take a sample of ~50 products that get some traffic from search right now. Take unique pictures and write unique content for those products. Then, measure the results. Did organic traffic increase after 30, 60, 90 days? If so, you know that you've got a problem with duplicate content worth correcting. I hope that helps.
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
-
How to deal with this duplicate content
Hello our websites offers prayer times in the US and UK. The problem is that we have nearby towns where the prayer times are the same and the pages (exp : https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-michigan-12258-en and https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-12147-en) are in duplicate . Same issue for this page https://prayer-time.uk/prayer-times-wallsend-411-en How can we solve this problem
On-Page Optimization | | Zakirou0 -
Will I have duplicate content on my own website?
Hello Moz community, We are an agency providing services to various industries, and among them the hair salon industry. On our website, we have our different service pages in the main menu, as usual. These service pages are general information and apply to any industry.We also have a page on the website that is only intended for the hair salon industry. On this page, we would like to link new service pages: they will be the same services as our “general” services, but specialized for hair salons. My questions relate to duplicate content: Do we have to make the new individual service pages for hair salons with completely different text, even though it’s the same service, in order to avoid having duplicate content? Can we just change a few words from the “general service” page to specifically target hair salons, and somehow avoid Google seeing it as duplicate content? Reminder that these pages will be internal links inside of the hair salon industry page. Thank you in advance for your answers, Gaël
On-Page Optimization | | Gael_Regnault0 -
Showing more Duplicate Title Tags Than WMT
This is yet another question between moz vs google WebMaster Tools. In WMT it only shows 5 pages with a total of 18 duplicate titles. But moz is showing 298. It appears the duplicates are canonical links for the most part. What is the discrepancy?
On-Page Optimization | | jamavan0 -
Duplicate Content for Event Pages
Hi Folks, I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them? Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue? I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks. Kind Regards Gareth Daine
On-Page Optimization | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Posting content from our books to our website
Hello, I am the newly appointed in-house seo person for a small business. The founders of our company have written several books, which we sell. But book sales are a small part of our business. We are considering posting to our website some or all of the content of the books. This content is directly relevant to the existing content of our website and would be available for free to all visitors. 1. Is it likely that the traffic and links to the new book pages would improve the search engine rankings of our existing pages? 2. We already have pdf versions of each book we could post, which are formatted nicely. Should we convert these to html to make them more friendly to search engines? 3. Of course, we would have to split each book into multiple web pages, perhaps one chapter per page. How much content could each new page optimally accommodate? 4. Would it be more valuable from an SEO perspective to post pieces of the books over time in a blog format? Thank you very much for your thoughts!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hello, I got duplicate content issue on my home page : examplesite.com
On-Page Optimization | | digitalkiddie
examplesite.com/index.html Those page urls are with duplicate content. If in index.html i use 301 redirect like that : Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://examplesite.com" );
?> would i loose any page authority ? sorry for the newbie question0 -
Schema.org for news websites?
So as of late I have been on something of a mission to mark up my news website with as much accurate and detailed Schema and Open Graph data as possible, in order to not only allow the search engines to understand my content properly, but also to ensure everything appears in the most ideal fashion when linked to from Facebook, Google+, etc. Here is an example of a typical article page: http://www.nerdscoop.net/technology/video-games-459 As you'll see I currently have news posts marked up as article because that is essentially exactly what they are, but is there a better way to emphasise that they are news rather than just generic articles? My second question is regarding the category pages and the home page. How would be best to mark these up? With OG the task is fairly simple, because I can specify the homepage as being a website, but not so with Schema from what I can see. Either way, this is an interesting subject to me and I look forward to any discussion as a result. Thanks for looking.
On-Page Optimization | | HalogenDigital0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Title
When you are in Error status for Duplicate Page Titles - but it is because of the root domain: Example.com and Example.com/index How to you go about changing the title of the same page without looking un-natural. My client has built his site with the - index file pulling to the root - but the crawlers are seeing TWO separate pages - when in reality they are the same. Riddle me this batman?
On-Page Optimization | | Chenzo0