Duplicate content from category pages?
-
I have an ecommerce store with different categories for my products. Some products do appear in more than one category, is that an issue even if you end up on the same product page/link?
Also, I have a "show all products" category, which I believe creates duplicate content too?
What is your take on this? What can I do to solve this? Is it even an issue of duplicate content?
All answers are very much appreciated!
-
Hey all, I was reading this post and I have a slightly different situation wherein my products are appearing in different categories as duplicate entries and also as different urls, what are the implications then?
-
Yeah, I think Nakul is on the right track here. You don't have to worry about the product pages themselves, because the categories converge on one URL. The search pages could be considered "thin" content, but it really depends on the scope of pages relative to your overall site. Rel=prev/next is a good bet for reducing your exposure (and it's low risk), but the solution depends a bit on the situation.
It's not a high-risk situation - it's more a matter of diluting your index (potentially) with hundreds or thousands of search pages that Google may not find very valuable.
-
Ohh sorry.. In that case, you do not need to implement canonical code .. sorry my bad ..:(
_So, what I understand is that you are concerned about boiler plate template and what I personally feel is that you do not need to worry about them because this is not going to affect the visibility of your website in one way or the other. _
-
It's only the product name in the category listings. Great! Thanks a lot Nakul.
-
Daniel, are you displaying product description on these category pages ? If not, if it's just the product name, you are fine.
-
Alright. My website is just a few months old and I haven't been that active promoting it or improving it (until just a few weeks back now).
My domain authority I would say is very low, maybe you know a way I can find out exactly what it is?
We have less than 200 products on the site, and as stated earlier 3-4 out of 10 is visible in more than one category (duplicated).
Does this give you any indication on my situation, to be able to give me advice on what to do to resolve this?
Once again, thank you for your patience!
-
Deb, Daniel's case does not sound like having multiple URLs of the same Product. It's just that the same product is listed under multiple categories. So depending upon the percentage of duplicate products vs the unique products listed in a category, it may or may not be okay. Also, this may vary based on how big your website is, unique content on the category level pages as well as the overall domain authority.
-
Daniel
I am guessing you have around 200 products exposed in approximately 18 categories, however there may be some overlap in the products within the categories, but the product URLs themselves are unique, so there is no content duplication between the product URLs themselves. You are just checking to make sure if a Red Widget Listed under Category A as well as Category B is okay. With your ratio being 3-4 out of 10, I won't be concerned.
If however this increases to over 50%, I'd be concerned in having 20 category pages being duplicate of each other by over 50%. The closer to 100%, the higher the risk. The closer to 0%, the lower the risk.
And it's just the product name you display on the category level page, not the product description right ? If yes, I'd say you are good to go. Don't worry about it too much at this point.
I hope this helps.
-
So if it is the same URL to the product page in both categories it is visible, it's no problem at all?
For example:
Product X is visible in two categories, category Y and category Z.
I first visit the product through category Y, and the URL is: www.example.com/productx/1
And I then visit the same product, but this time through category Z. The URL for the product page is exactly the same: www.example.com/productx/1And there is no sign of redirect, as I should see a reload of the page changing the url when I first land on the product page, right?
Would be great if you could get give green light! Or tell me what to do if there still is a problem after all. Thanks!
-
if the same product is available two or more different paths/URLs, you need to set the preferred version as canonical. This will fix the issue of internal duplicate content. -
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
Make sure that you are adding link reference of only canonical version of the URLs in the XML sitemap.
-
As I read the posts you suggested, I realized I was not clear enough when I wrote my question.
What the "show all" means on my page is that it shows ALL products from ALL categories in a new/separate category called "show all".
So it is NOT as in the example on google webmasters blogpost, that it is a "show all" alternative in every single category showing that category products on one page.
Hope I was more clear this time! Thank you for your patience.
-
Thanks for the response Nakul!
I would say that 3-4 out of 10 products are shown in more than one category. As for how many categories I have, there is 18 unique categories (and then you have the "show all" on top of that).
Our domain authority is pretty low so far (working on it ;). Our site was launched just a couple months back and we havn't been that active with improving it until just a few weeks back.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "page 1, page 2 and a show all"? Nor, "Is it to land on Page 1 or the View-All page". What page are you talking about when you say Page 1?
If I understand you correctly, we do have several pages of products under the "show all" category (i.e. it's not displaying all products in one single long page).
The products in the "show all" category are exact duplicates from the ones in the specific categories. The products in "show all" are unique from each other though.
You are very helpful! I'm just trying to understand more clearly.
-
How widespread is your "products" appearing in multiple categories ? ARe you talking about 8 out of 10 products in the category duplicate / very similar to the same collection appearing in the other category ? It really depends how many categories you have, how many products, how deep this is compared to what other unique data you have on the page combined with your domain authority etc.
As for Show All, do you also have page 1, page 2 and a show all ? Do they have unique page titles and descriptions ? What do you want to appear in the SERPS for the users ? So if I search on Google for Red Widgets, what's a good experience for me. Is it to land on Page 1 or the View-All page ? Based on what you want to do, I suggest you look at:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
I hope this 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
-
Duplicate Content
When I say duplicate content, I don't mean that the content on a clients site is displaying on another site on the web or taken from a site on the web. A client has a few product pages and each product page has content on the bottom of the page (4-5 paragraphs) describing the product. Now, this content is also displaying on other pages, but re-worded so it's not 100% duplicate. Some pages show a duplicate content % ranging from 12% to 35% and maybe 40%. Just curious if I should suggest having each product page less than 10% duplicated. Thanks for your help.
On-Page Optimization | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Category Page Content
Hey Mozzers, I've recently been doing a content audit on the category and sub-category pages on our site. The old pages had the following "profile" Above The Fold
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
Page Heading
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products
600 words+ of content duplicated from articles, sub categories and products My criticisms of the page were
1. No content (text) above the fold
2. Page content was mostly duplicated content
3. No keyword structure, many pages competed for the same keywords and often unwanted pages outranked the desired page for the keyword. I cleaned this up to the following structure Above The Fold
H1 Page Heading 80-200 Word of Content (Including a link to supporting article)
H2 Page Heading (Expansion or variance of the H1 making sure relevant) 80-200 150 Words of Content
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products The new pages are now all unique content, targeted towards 1-2 themed keywords. I have a few worries I was hoping you could address. 1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?
2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.
3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selction of keywords, for example.
a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting infromation
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I dont want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categories Any other critisms or comment welcome0 -
Empty public profiles are viewed as duplicate content. What to do?
Hi! I manage a social networking site. We have a lot of public user profiles that are viewed as duplicate content. This is because these users haven't filled out any public profile info and thus the profiles are "empty" (except for the name). Is this something I should worry about? If yes, what are my options to solve this? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | thomasvanderkleij0 -
Duplicate Page Title issues
Hello, I have a duplicate page title problem: Crawl Diagnostics Reported that my website got **sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Title **between:
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs.html and these URLs below:http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-2
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-3
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-4
http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/page-5 I don't know why, because I have already implemented rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to canonical pages. Please give me an advice!0 -
Duplicate Content only an Issue on a Huge Scale?
To what extent is duplicate content an issue? We have a support forum with some duplicate content because users ask the same questions. The Moz reports we receive highlights our duplicate content and page title for our support forum as a "big" issue. I'm unsure to what extent it harms our SEO, and making the support section non-crawable would impair our level of support. It would be nice to know for sure if we should be concerned about this, and if yes, how can we do it differently? Thanks, I appreciate you help. -Allan
On-Page Optimization | | Todoist0 -
Summarize your question.Images being seen as duplicate content/pages
My images suddenly are appearing in my crawl reports as duplicate content, without meta tags, this happened over night and cant figure out why.
On-Page Optimization | | RBYoung0 -
Duplicate content problem
I am having an issue with duplicate content that I can't seem to figure out. I got rid of the www.mydomain.com by modifying the htaccess file but I can't figure out how to fix theproblem of mydomain.com/ and mydomain.com
On-Page Optimization | | ayetti0 -
Duplicate Content Warning
Hi Mozers, I have a question about the duplicate content warnings I am recieving for some of my pages. I noticed that the below pattern of URLs are being flagged as duplicate content. I understand that these are seen as two different pages but I would like to know if this has an negative impact on my SEO? Why is this happening? How do I stop it from happening? http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html?sef_rewrite=1 http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | mozmonkey0