Nice looking ecommerce menus with featured product categories - bad for SEO due to duplicate content?
-
My ecommerce website has menus which contain 'featured product sub-categories'. These are shown alongside the other product sub-category links. Each 'featured product category' includes a link, an image (with link) and some text.
All menu content is visible to search engines.
These menus look nice and probably encourage CTR (not tested!) but are they bad for SEO?
-
Thanks, I think I'll just leave these for now as it's only three sub categories that have the 'tripling up' of links. Appreciate you both taking the time to reply.
-
Hello Coraltoes,
I would not rely on a nofollow attribute for those links. Instead, you could approach this in several different ways...
#1. Don't worry about it. If you're talking about an extra few links it really isn't going to make that big of a difference, though the text link should probably be first since it has the best anchor text.
#2. Remove them and rely on sub-navigation in the sidebar for sending people to the "featured" section of each category.
#3. Put the Featured fly-out navigation in javascript, while keeping the rest of the main navigation in HTML/CSS.
#4. Sometimes it is possible to wrap a single href tag around an image AND text, which would cut the superfluous links in half.
If you discuss these options with your developers perhaps some other ideas will come to light as well.
Good luck!
-
I may be relying on out-of-date information. I read about this here
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-situations-where-you-should-use-nofollow-for-linking/6361/
-
Thanks for the reply.
Yes, the same link is displayed three times in the navigation menu (so two repeats)! There are 3 of these featured menu items in total.
I thought the official line from Google was no to nofollows for internal links? Has this changed?
-
Are you saying that you have the same link displayed multiple times in your navigation menu? If so, you should probably rel="nofollow" the duplicates.
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
-
Using h2 for category on ecommerce website
Hi, I am working on an ecommerce site and the main category - lets call them car widgets - is using a h1 at the top of the page which is great. There are 4 sub categories on the page - lets call one of them red widget. The only content on the page is the sub category name and an image. Should the sub category red widget use a h2? Thanks S
On-Page Optimization | | bedynamic0 -
Consolidating a Large Site with Duplicate Content
I will be restructuring a large website for an OEM. They provide products & services for multiple industries, and the product/service offering is identical across all industries. I was looking at the site structure and ran a crawl test, and learned they have a LOT of duplicate content out there because of the way they set up their website. They have a page in the navigation for “solution”, aka what industry you are in. Once that is selected, you are taken to a landing page, and from there, given many options to explore products, read blogs, learn about the business, and contact them. The main navigation is removed. The URL structure is set up with folders, so no matter what you select after you go to your industry, the URL will be “domain.com/industry/next-page”. The product offerings, blogs available, and contact us pages do not vary by industry, so the content that can be found on “domain.com/industry-1/product-1” is identical to the content found on “domain.com/industry-2/product-1” and so-on and so-forth. This is a large site with a fair amount of traffic because it’s a pretty substantial OEM. Most of their content, however, is competing with itself because most of the pages on their website have duplicate content. I won’t begin my work until I can dive in to their GA and have more in-depth conversations with them about what kind of activity they’re tracking and why they set up the website this way. However, I don’t know how strategic they were in this set up and I don’t think they were aware that they had duplicate content. My first thought would be to work towards consolidating the way their site is set up, so we don’t spread the link-equity of “product-1” content, and direct all industries to one page, and track conversion paths a different way. However, I’ve never dealt with a site structure of this magnitude and don’t want to risk messing up their domain authority, missing redirect or URL mapping opportunities, or ruin the fact that their site is still performing well, even though multiple pages have the same content (most of which have high page authority and search visibility). I was curious if anyone has dealt with this before and if they have any recommendations for tackling something like this?
On-Page Optimization | | cassy_rich0 -
Duplicate content errors
I have multiple duplicate content errors in my crawl diagnostics. The problem is though that i already took care of these problems with the canonical tag but MOZ keeps saying there is a problem. For example this page http://www.letspump.dk/produkter/56-aminosyre/ has a canonical tag, but moz still says it has an error. Why is that?
On-Page Optimization | | toejklemme0 -
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 -
Duplicate Content: Snippets from Blog on Website
Our company has a website and a blog, each on a separate domain. On our website's home page, we include snippets from some of our blog posts and links to such posts. The snippets include the same photo, title, and first line or so of text. We have been told and am concerned that search engines will categorize this as duplicate content. Any recommendation as to how we can get around this issue aside from not including the blog posts on our site? I imagine we are not the first company to want to do this. www.angelicolaw.com Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | BrazilLaw
Greg0 -
Ecommerce - how many clicks from the home page should categories be
My client has about 300 products in 20 categories with a lot of overlap. How many clicks from the home page should we keep the products? We're not doing pagination. I'd been told several years ago that all products should be 2 clicks or less from the home page. Is this true today? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW1 -
How Should I Fix Duplicate Content in Wordpress Pages
In GWMT i see google found 41 duplicate content in my wordpress blog. I am using Yoast SEO plugin to avoid those type of duplicates but still the problem was stick.. You can check the screenshot here - http://prntscr.com/dxfjq Please help..
On-Page Optimization | | mamuti0 -
Duplicate Title & Content in WordPress
I'm getting a lot of Crawl Errors due to duplicate content and duplicate title because of category and tag posts in WordPress. I rebuilt the sitemap and said to exclude category and tags, should that clear up the issue? I've also went through and did NO INDEX and NO FOLLOW for all categories and posts. Any thoughts on this issue?
On-Page Optimization | | seantgreen0