Duplicate Content on Category Pages
-
Hi Everyone,
I have a few category pages within a category for my eCommerce store and I've recently started writing a short description for each. However a lot of these paragraphs can be replicated for the same category. For instance '1 Inch thickness' I'll show all the information, and it'll be very similar to '2 inch thickness' but obviously one is 1 inch and one is 2 inch so I would only be changing one keyword and that is the thickness.
I feel that this is helping customers because it has all the information in each category e.g. how to filter your choices. But it might be duplicate content.
What would you recommend?
-
Hi Rachel,
Thank you for clarifying that for me. If you are creating multiple categories and they only have one keyword to separate them would be considered duplicate content by Google my answer would yes it would. That's why you have to make your descriptions much different than the existing descriptions for any other categories.
I know it is hard using a different description when one might be the perfect fit. However Google does care about this thing and it would lead to duplicate content issues.
I hope this has been of help sincerely,
Thomas
-
I don't think you are understanding my question, I am creating descriptions for different categories that only have one different keyword. I want to make sure this isn't considered duplicate content, and if it is, what should I do?
-
What type of content management system are you using? If it's WordPress Yoast WordPress SEO would fix this issue.
http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
or
magento
http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/
Let me know if you're using a different content management system as I can offer different ways of helping.
Duplicate content will simply be ignored unfortunately by Google. Will not get ranking you want. The important thing to do is to write very very different descriptions of your product especially keep it far away from what manufacturer uses as their domain trust is probably higher than what your stores is using. Scribecontent.com is excellent tool for this. Another method is to use yoast to fix magento or WP
Sincerely,
Thomas
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 with tagging and categories
Hello, Moz is showing that a site has duplicate content - which appears to be because of tags and categories. It is a relatively new site, with only a few blog publications so far. This means that the same articles are displayed under a number of different tags and categories... Is this something I should worry about, or just wait until I have more content? The 'tag' and 'category' pages are not really pages I would expect or aim for anyone to find in google results anyway. Would be glad to here any advice / opinions on this Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | wearehappymedia1 -
Magento - How to avoid duplicate content on products that span different sites.
We have 4 Magento store fronts that operate out of the same backend. Is there any way to safely have products that span multiple stores without getting a duplicate content penalty? thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Shop-Sq0 -
Title tag of product page including category keyword?
I'm doing some work on a site that essentially is about giving and getting reviews. It's heirarchy has categories and products within those categories. For the title tag of the product pages, they currently have "Best {Category} | {Product} Reviews" I've advised them that they should remove the "Best {Category}" part because a) they're already targeting the category pages themselves and b) from a user perspective, the product page should just have a title tag that makes sense for that particular page (the page is not necessarily the "best" and certainly is not a series of products within that category). I wanted to post here to confirm that my advice is sound. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | jim_shook0 -
Duplicate Content on our own website
Our website sells tickets for events. We also have an news articles section with information about events / artists / venues. From time to time we release a product page and a related news article on a separate page. Some of the content in the news article would be perfect for our product page. Essentially its our product page we want too rank. Would it harm our SEO if we had some of the same content on both of these pages?
On-Page Optimization | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate content, is it ever ok?
I am building a large site for a client who sells physical products. I am using WordPress as my CMS (as a piece of background information). There are a few products that need to be listed in the sites hierarchy in multiple locations as such: Parent A Child 1 Parent B Child 2 Child 3 Parent C Child 1 I am concerned that having a product exist in multiple instances will cause indexing problems for that product. I can't be the only person to come across this issue, would love some feedback on the best practices for such an issue. Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Qcmny0 -
Dealing with thin content/95% duplicate content - canonical vs 301 vs noindex
My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in. They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area. I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue. So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages). Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!
On-Page Optimization | | JamesFx0 -
Exponentially Increasing Duplicate Content On Blogs
Most of the clients that I pick up are either new to SEO best practices, or have worked with sketchy SEO providers in the past, who did little more than build spammy links. Most of them have deployed little if any on-site SEO best practices, and early on I spend a lot of time fixing canonical and duplicate content issues alla 301 redirects. Using SEOMOZ, however, I see a lot of duplicate content issues with blogs that live on the sites I work on. With every new blog article we publish, more duplicate content builds up. I feel like duplicate content on blogs grows exponentially, because every time you write a blog article, it exists provisionally on the blog homepage, the article link, a category page, maybe a tag page, and an author page. I have a two-part question: Is duplicate content like this a problem for a blog -- and for the website that the blog lives on? Are search engines able to parse out that this isn't really duplicate content? If it is a problem, how would you go about solving it? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Is rel=canonical used only for duplicate content
Can the rel-canonical be used to tell the search engines which page is "preferred" when there are similar pages? For instance, I have an internal page that Google is showing on the first page of the SERPs that I would prefer the home page be ranked for. Both the home and internal page have been optimized for the same keyword. What is interesting is that the internal page has very few backlinks compared to the home page but Google seems to favor it since the keyword is in the URL. I am afraid a 301 will drop us from the first page of the SERPs.
On-Page Optimization | | surveygizmo0