Crawl Diagnostics Summary - Duplicate Content
-
Hello SEO Experts,
I am a developer at www.bowanddrape.com and we are working on improving the SEO of the website. The SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostics Summary shows that following 2 URL have duplicate content.
http://www.bowanddrape.com/clothing/Tan+Accessories+Calfskin+Belt/50_5142
http://www.bowanddrape.com/clothing/Black+Accessories+Calfskin+Belt/50_5143
Can you please suggest me ways to fix this problem?
Is the duplicate content error because of same "The Details", "Size Chart" and "The Silhouette" and "You may also like" ?
Thanks,
Chirag
-
It's tough, because these variations/customizations are legitimately what you do. My gut feeling, though, is that 80K (I'm seeing 90K with a site: search) indexed pages is just too much for your current link profile. It doesn't mean you'll get in trouble, but it could mean that your ranking power is spread far too thin.
While it's not a decision I'd take lightly, I do think there's an advantage here to either:
(1) Consolidating variations under one URL
(2) Having multiple URLs, but possibly using rel=canonical (I think that's your best bet) to focus Google on one parent URL for each product
-
Dr. Peter, Thanks for the useful insight, right now google web master tool shows that 82,563 pages on our website are in google's index, but sadly none are getting any direct traffic from google search results. We are "design your own dress company" so each "product" can have 1000s of variations, most are similar to google, but not to the end-user. So I think what you are saying is that consolidating all variations of 1 product to 1 page could result in more power on the single product page. Can you please confirm?
-
I'm gonna disagree mildly. It is common to have color variation pages, and it is perfectly useful to end-users. So, you're not doing anything wrong, in that sense. However, these pages don't look very different to Google (minor variations in title and content), and so we do flag them as near duplicates because Google might consider them "thin". At large scale, that could dilute your ranking ability.
If you have 100s or 1000s of these pages and a relatively weak link profile, it might be worth considering canonical tags here. The trade-off is that you would consolidate your ranking power, but one variation would fall out of search results. So, it really depends not only on the scope of the problem, but the strength of the site, and how important these long-tail color-based searches are to your current traffic. There's no one-sized-fits-all answer.
-
Thanks Eyepaq. I can keep it as is, but I will try to make them more brown or black by adding brown or black to the The Details and the The Silhouette.
-
Thanks. I will try to make them more unique.
-
At the moment the pages are too similar so are coming up as dups, (they also will most likely compete with each other in the serps too)
My advice would be either make them more different content wise, or have one page that covers both terms (I would guess they would be long tail terms anyway, so that might be the best option)
using canonical links it telling google they are the same page content wise and which is the "master page" to show in the serps
-
In this case you can let those be as they are...
No harm to the website or pages for this "issue" - it is a common think for this type of color / type differences and you should not add rel canonical or redirect it s you need them both in the search pages.
There is no down side of having those like this.
Cheers.
-
Thanks for the Reply Bryan. I have used canonical links at other places on the website, where the pages are same.
I want to make the 2 pages so that I can attract users both user searching for black belt as well as brown bag. Would adding canonical links help me in doing that, or am I thinking of this in the wrong way?
-
You need to add a canonical tags to let search engines know that the content is almost identical.
here is an awesome post to get you all set up: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
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
-
Does loading content from an ajax url count as a bounce rate
Hi, Our current website http://www.luxresorts.com has sections that pull content through AJAX which is accessible through a URL. For example, on our homepage, we have a section called "LUX* Magazine THE TASTEMAKER", if you click on "Read More" it would open on the same page while pulling content from this URL: http://www.luxresorts.com/en/posts/lux-magazine. There are two concerns here: a. the above url does not contain any google analytics code, does pulling content from a url through ajax cause a bounce rate? b. since the url is indepenedent, the is no meta tags including title, description or even robot attributes. Should we treat this page as all other pages? Thank you for your help. Tej Luchmun
Web Design | | luxresorts0 -
How would a redesign, content update and URL change affect ranking?
Hi guys, I have a question that I suspect there is no simple true or false answer to, but perhaps someone has done the same thing as we're pondering wether or not to do? We're taking over an existing site that ranks very well on all the important keywords and is obviously very well liked by Google. The site is today hosted on a sub-domain (xxx.domain.com). When taking over, we'll have to redesign the site and recreate most of the content on the site (unique). The site structure, URLs, incoming links etc. will remain exactly the same. Since we are recreating the site, we also have the opportunity to move the site off the sub-domain and on to the main domain (domain.com/xxx - 85/100 Moz rank) and do a 301 Permanent Redirect on all old URLs. Our long-time experience is that content on the main domain, ranks way better than the sub-domain. The big question is wether or not Google will punish us for both changing the content and the location of the site at the same time? Cheers!
Web Design | | mattbs
Matt0 -
Advice needed: Google crawling for single page applicartions with java script
Hi Moz community,we have a single page application (enjoywishlist.com) with a lot of content in java script light boxes. There is a lot of valuable content embedded but google can not crawl the content and we can missing out on some opportunities as a result. I was wondering if someone was able to solve a similar issue (besides moving the content from the java script to the HTML body). There appears to be a few services sprouting up to handle single page applications and crawling in google.http://getseojs.com/https://prerender.io/Did anyone use these services? Some feedback would be much appreciated!ThanksAndreas
Web Design | | AndreasD0 -
How do I optimize a site designed to be one scrolling page of content?
Our website uses section ID's as its navigation so all the content is on one page. When you click About Us, the page scrolls down to About Us. Products, the page scrolls to Products section, and etc. I am getting crawl errors for meta descriptions but will this go away once the main domain has this info? We just added the meta keywords and description to the header and since the navigation sections use the same page, I assume it will correct the errors. Any other advice on optimizing for site designs like ours would be great. www.theicecubekit.com is the site. Thanks,
Web Design | | bangbang
Chris0 -
Duplicate content issue
I have recently built a site that has a main page intended to rank for national coverage. This site also has a number of pages targeted at local searches, these pages are slight variations of each other with town specific keywords. Does anyone know if google will see this as spam and quarantine my site from ranking? Thanks
Web Design | | stebutty0 -
Duplicate content and blog/twitter feeds
Hi Mozzers, I have a question... I'm planning to add a blog summary/twitter feed throughout my website (onto every main content page) and then started worrying about duplicate content. What is best practice here? Let me know - thanks, Luke PS. I sat down and re: blog feed... thought that perhaps it would help if I fed different blog posts through to different pages (which I could then edit so I could add<a></a> text different from that in blog). Not sure about twitter.
Web Design | | McTaggart1 -
Duplicate Content Problem on Our Site?
Hi, Having read the SEOMOZ guide and already worried about this previously, I have decided to look further into this. Our site is 4-5 years old, poorly built by a rouge firm so we have to stick with what we have for now. Were I think we might be getting punished is duplicate content across various pages. We have a Brands page, link at top of page. Here we are meant to enter each brand we stock and a little write up on that brands. What we then put in these write ups is used on each brands item page when we click a brand name on the left nav bar. Or when we click a Product Type (eg. Footwear) then click on a brand filter on the left. So this in theory is duplicate content. The SEO title and Meta Description for each brand is then used on the Brands Page and also on each page with the Brands Product on. As we have entered this brand info, you will notice that the page www.designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/armani-jeans/ has the same brand description in the scroll box at the top as the page www.designerboutique-online.com/shirts/armani-jeans/ and all the other product type pages. The same SEO title and same Meta descriptions. Only the products change from each one. This then applies to each brand we have (at least 15) across about 8 pages. All with different URLs but the same text. Not sure how a 301 or rel: canonical would work for this, as each URL needs to point at specific pages (eg. shirts, shorts etc...). Some brands such as Creative Recreation and Cruyff only sell footwear, so technically I think??? We could 301 to the Footwear/ URL rather than having both all-clothing and footwear file paths? This surely must be down to the bad design? Could we be losing valulable rank and juice because of this issue? And how would I go about fixing it? I want a new site, but funds are tight. But if this issue is so big that only a new site would fix it, then maybe the money would need to come forward. What do people make of this? Cheers Will
Web Design | | YNWA0 -
Website using javascript to serve up content - SEO Friendly?
I'm checking out a dentist website http://www.sagedentalnj.com/ I was referred by a friend so just taking a little peek at it. When you click on the menu items, the url at the top doesn't change. When you view source, the page titles are all the same. when I do site:http://www.sagedentalnj.com/ none of his pages are indexed by google. What can be done with his site so that google sees his pages? Maybe submit sitemap?
Web Design | | Czubmeister0