E-Commerce Duplicate Content
-
Hello all
We have an e-commerce website with approximately 3,000 products. Many of the products are displayed in multiple categories which in turn generates a different URL!
Accross the entire site I have noticed that the product pages are always outranked by competitors who have lower page authority, domain authority, total links etc etc.
I am convinced this is down to duplicate content issues. I understand there is no direct penalty but how would this affect our rankings? Is page rank split between all the duplicates, which in turn lowers it's ranking potential?
I have looked for a way to identify duplicate content using Google analytics but i've been unsuccessful. If the duplicate content is the issue and page rank is divided am i best using canonical or 301 redirects?
Sorry if this is an obvious question but If i'm correct we could see a huge improvement in rankings accross the board. Wow!
Cheers
Todd
-
When Google finds more than one document (ie URL) with the same content, it has to define which of them is the representative document of the cluster. In doing this it looks at inbound link metrics, essentially, plus date of the page, pagerank and other factors. In this decision, it can be wrong, indexing a page that can hurt you indexation (consider this situation: it indexes as representative document page 2 of a listing page in descending order: new items in this category end to be at page 2 or later and are less likely to be discovered).
The canonical tag can be a good solution, even if it is a hint and not a rule to Google...
-
Great stuff thanks!...
-
SEOMOZ had an awesome whiteboard on this.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation
Some more additional resources:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dealing-with-faceted-navigation-a-case-study
Matt Cutts on faceted navigation:
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml
Hope they help you
-
Thanks again! Unfortunately our system was built in house from scratch with no consideration for duplicate content
To be honest the product pages that I'm worried about have very few or no inbound links so maybe this isn't such a huge issue.
I have picked up on the fact almost all our pages including the homepage work on www and non www so maybe creating a 301 redirect for these will help also.
I will test the conical tag on a range of pages and mointor the results, hopefully our rankings will increase and I can look at some kind of strategy to roll this out.
Cheers for the help!
-
Google will select the most authortive aka whichever has the most links.
If you have a ton of inbound links I would recommend doing lots of research before inserting that tag. Find out which pages have the authority and don't throw it away.
This was a plague of eCommerce for years. Luckly most of the newest moden platfroms have caught up.
-
The duplicate item pages will not be indexed but visited the google bot. He will consider this page to be the one linked in the canonical tag.
I hope you won't have to set the urls manually !
-
Thanks for the quick response chaps! So if we have 9 duplicates for example will Google index all 9 pages or decide on 1 and never revisit the rest.
I couldn't see any duplicate URLs in the top content report.
We have over 3,000 products so it will be fun adding canonical tags to all the necessary pages
-
Toddy,
For every product of your site, you should identify its main category (the one that will be indexed). When seeing a product with a different category url, use the rel=canonical tag to give google the good url. This works well with e-commerce site.
You may also apply this logic between categories, as some listing between two categories are sometimes very similar.
For more information about the rel=canonical tag, see these resources :
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
-
The only "penalty" is the fact you could potentially spread your link juice across those multiple pages. Example:
You have 104 links to the same product, but they are equally pointed a 4 unique URLs. Now you technically have 26 links on whatever page Google 'selects' as your authority page.
Your competition has 100 links to the same product which only has 1 page.
With that type of setup your competition is always going to have that authority page ranked abouve you.
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
-
Moving E-Commerce Store to Subdomain?
Hi all, We have a customer who currently uses Square for their in-store point-of-sale system as well as for their e-commerce website. From my understanding, a Square site is a watered-down version of Weebly, and is proving to be highly restrictive from an SEO and content structuring standpoint. It's been an uphill battle to try and get traction for their site in SERPs. Would it be a bad idea to move the entire Square online store to a subdomain, and install WordPress on the root domain? This way their online store would remain as-is, but the primary pages on the site would be on WordPress which would give us a lot more control over the content. I just want to make sure this doesn't negatively impact their SEO. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | suarezventures0 -
Duplicate Footer Content Issue
Please check given screenshot URL. As per the screenshot we are using highlighted content through out the website in the footer section of our website (https://www.mastersindia.co/) . So, please tell us how Google will treat this content. Will Google count it as duplicate content or not? What is the solution in case if the Google treat it as duplicate content. Screenshot URL: https://prnt.sc/pmvumv
Technical SEO | | AnilTanwarMI0 -
Duplicate content question...
I have a high duplicate content issue on my website. However, I'm not sure how to handle or fix this issue. I have 2 different URLs landing to the same page content. http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/vegan/ and http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/raw-food/ .In this situation, I cannot redirect one URL to the other since in the future I will probably be adding additional posts to either the "vegan" tag or the "raw food tag". What is the solution in this case? Thank you
Technical SEO | | myfitstation0 -
Duplicate Content Problem!
Hi folks, I have a quite awkward problem. Since a few weeks a get a huge amount of "duplicate content errors" in my MOZ crawl reports. After a while of looking for the error I thought of the domains I've bought additionally. So I went to Google and typed in site:myotherdomains.com The results was as I expected that my original website got indexed with my new domains aswell. That means: For example my original website was index with www.domain.com/aboutus - Then I bought some additional domains which are pointing on my / folder. What happened is that I also get listed with: www.mynewdomains.com/com How can I fix that? I tried a normal domain redirect but it seems as this doesn't help as when I am visiting www.mynewdomains.com the domain doesnt change in my browser to www.myoriginaldomain.com but stays with it ... I was busy the whole day to find a solution but I am kinda desperate now. If somebody could give me advice it would be much appreciated. Mike
Technical SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Tips and duplicate content
Hello, we have a search site that offers tips to help with search/find. These tips are organized on the site in xml format with commas... of course the search parameters are duplicated in the xml so that we have a number of tips for each search parameter. For example if the parameter is "dining room" we might have 35 pieces of advice - all less than a tweet long. My question - will I be penalized for keyword stuffing - how can I avoid this?
Technical SEO | | acraigi0 -
Filter Tag Duplicate Content E-Commerce Issue
Hello, I just launched a new site for a client but am seeing some duplicate content issues in the campaign crawl. It has to do with the drill-down, filter "tags" that helps users find the product they are looking for. You can see them in the sidebar here: http://www.ssmd.com/shop/ In my crawl report this is what is showing up as duplicate content (attached image). How do I keep these widgets from generating duplicate content on the site? Also, not sure if it's important or not, but I am using Wordpress, WooCommerce and Yoast's SEO Tool. Any suggestions are appreciated! Screen%20Shot%202012-10-23%20at%202.56.00%20PM.png
Technical SEO | | kylehungate0 -
Duplicate page content
hi I am getting an duplicate content error in SEOMoz on one of my websites it shows http://www.exampledomain.co.uk http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/ http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html how can i fix this? thanks darren
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Wordpress for e-commerce
What plugin should I use to make a webshop taht is good for seo as well? Should I use wordpress indeed or should i use some other open source CMS?
Technical SEO | | sesertin0