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
-
SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages
Hi Moz friends, I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd). This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30. As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance. This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct. The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic. I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here. Thank you in advance!
Technical SEO | | smmour2 -
Duplicate Page Titles Across Portfolio Items
Hi, Quick question about duplicate page titles. I have a few duplicate pages where I've got lots of portfolio items under the same category, lets call it a portfolio of kangaroos. I can see there are separate URLs for each of the pages, i.e, www.blahblah.com/portfolio/kangaroos and www.blahblah.com/portfolio/kangaroos/2, but they both have the same page title, i.e, Kangaroos Portfolio | Domain and it's coming up in Moz as a medium priority duplicate page title error. Where in WordPress can I change the page title for the second page of portfolio items? Thanks very much! Tom.
Technical SEO | | onefoursix0 -
Miss meta description on 404 page
Hi, My 404 page did not have meta description. Is it an error? Because I run report and seomoz said that a problem. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
After I 301 redirect duplicate pages to my rel=canonical page, do I need to add any tags or code to the non canonical pages?
I have many duplicate pages. Some pages have 2-3 duplicates. Most of which have Uppercase and Lowercase paths (generated by Microsoft IIS). Does this implementation of 301 and rel=canonical suffice? Or is there more I could do to optimize the passing of duplicate page link juice to the canonical. THANK YOU!
Technical SEO | | PFTools0 -
Wordpress duplicate pages
I am using Wordpress and getting duplicate content Crawler error for following two pages http://edustars.yourstory.in/tag/edupristine/ http://edustars.yourstory.in/tag/education-startups/ These two are tags which take you to the same page. All the other tags/categories which take you to the same page or have same title are also throwing errors, how do i fix it?
Technical SEO | | bhanu22170 -
How to Solve Duplicate Page Content Issue?
I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tools for my website. I have found 89 duplicate content issue from report. Please, look in to Duplicate Page Content Issue. I am quite confuse to resolve this issue. Can any one suggest me best solution to resolve it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Multiple title and description change is considered spam?
I'm changing title and description several times throught 1-2 months... will Google penalize me? I'm worried that testing several title and description ideas would affect the site rankings on google. Anyone had a problem with that... or can i continue testing as many titles and descriptions as i want?
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0 -
Best way to create page title to products catalog
Hi guys, i'm having problems with duplicated page title, and i want to know what is the best way to avoid this problem. The example is like this: Title page (A): Product name A - category - section Title page (B): Product name B - category - section, What you think guys i can resolve this problem, Thank you so much for your help.
Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM0