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
-
How Does Google View Hidden Content?
I have a website which contains a lot of content behind a show hide, does Google crawl the "hidden" copy?
Web Design | | jasongmcmahon0 -
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages?
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. The 3 locations old domains were redirected to their sites within our main brand domain. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages? And possibly increase our domain authority hopefully? We didn't want our brand spread out over multiple websites/domains on the internet. This also allowed for more content to be written on pages, per each of our locations service's, as well.
Web Design | | BurgSimpson0 -
Why is google still crawling my old website pages?
Why is google still looking at my old indexed pages and not my new index. ? Why are they crawling my old website links when none of them are available? How do I overcome these problems?
Web Design | | optimalspaces0 -
Copy partial content to other pages ?
One of our clients looking to redesign their website since we're redesigning the whole website we thought it would be good idea to separate services into individual pages so every service will have it's own page (currently there is 1 page that describes all of the services). what we're planing to do is to write unique content for each service page (about 300-400 keywords), but we also want to use some of the existing content which is kind of explains the process of provided services. so here i need your help! what would be the best practice to use same part of existing content on every service page without getting penalized for duplicated content? here is how we want to structure the page with h1 and h2 <main> Service name (same as page title) Subline new and unique content about 300-400 keywords Part of old content which is going to be placed on every service page </main> any help would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | MozPro30 -
How do SEOMOZ calculate duplicate content?
first of all i have to much duplicate stuff on my website end cleaning it up. But if i look at GWMC the duplicate stuff is a lot less than in SEOMOZ? can someone explain to me what the difference is? Thnx, Leonie.
Web Design | | JoostBruining0 -
URL parameters causing duplicate content errors
My ISP implemented product reviews. In doing so, each page has a possible parameter string of ?wr=1. I am not receiving duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors for all my product URLs. The report shows the base URL and the base URL?wr=1. My ISP says that the search engines won't have a problem with the parameters and a check of Google Webmaster Tools for my site says I don't have any errors and recommends against configuring URL parameters. How can I get SEOmoz to stop reporting these errors?
Web Design | | NiftySon1 -
Duplicate content
Please help me to solve a problem with duplicate content errors.
Web Design | | NadiaFL
I received report today that 53 pages (all my pages) are market as duplicate
content. Yes, they are all about Oasis of the Seas but about different aspects
of it. Question is: how I can handle this error in report? Thank you!0 -
How serious is duplicate page content?
We just launched our site on a new platform - Magento Enterprise. We have a wholesale catalog and and retail catalog. We have up to 3 domains pointing to each product. We are getting tons of duplicate content errors. What are the best practices for dealing with this? Here is an example: mysite.com/product.html mysite.com/category/product.html mysite.com/dynamic-url
Web Design | | devonkrusich0