Is My Boilerplate Product Description Causing Duplicate Content Issues?
-
I have an e-commerce store with 20,000+ one-of-a-kind products. We only have one of each product, and once a product is sold we will never restock it. So I really have no intention to have these product pages showing up in SERPs. Each product has a boilerplate description that the product's unique attributes (style, color, size) are plugged into. But a few sentences of the description are exactly the same across all products.
Google Webmaster Tools doesn't report any duplicate content. My Moz Crawl Report show 29 of these products as having duplicate content. But a Google search using the site operator and some text from the boilerplate description turns up 16,400 product pages from my site.
Could this duplicate content be hurting my SERPs for other pages on the site that I am trying to rank? As I said, I'm not concerned about ranking for these products pages. Should I make them "rel=canonical" to their respective product categories? Or use "noindex, follow" on every product? Or should I not worry about it?
-
My SERPs for a competitive term I felt I underperforming for dropped about 10 spots overnight after I added "noindex,follow" to the product pages. From the 3rd page to the 4th page, so it's not like I had a lot to lose. My SERPs for less competitive long tail keywords, which is where I'm getting most of my traffic, have dropped slightly or stayed the same.
Should I cross my fingers and hope for a recovery? Revert the product pages back to "index, follow"? Any thoughts?
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks so much for the thorough response.
Based on several comparative metrics with sites that are outranking me significantly, I do feel the site is underperforming. Because our traffic is ridiculously seasonal the Panguin Tool doesn't provide any clues.
I just added to all my products using Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin. We'll see what happens.
Thanks,
Zach -
Hi Zachary
I really can't be sure if it's having an adverse affect, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Having looked at just 3 of the product pages, there is a problem with content being repeated, but I think it is being compounded by there being no other content on the page either to make it look unique.
Both are the hallmarks to a potential Panda penalty, which could affect the pages performance themselves and/or the whole domain. So, if you're seeing subpar performance (and even if you're performing well it's worth reading on) I would look at the following solution.
For every product that you do not intend to restock or reuse, I would either add a tag, add a 301 redirect or simply remove the page and serve a 404. If we're talking tens of thousands, then having that many redirects might bloat out your .htaccess file (making it larger and longer to load/process) and having an instant drop of 20k URLs and 404 errors might look a bit odd to Google as well. However, adding 20k tags is a bit of a nightmare as well.
You might want to try a combination of all 3 - a few 404 errors is nothing to worry about - but the logic is that you will be removing a number of pages that have this duplicate content on it, thus improving the quality of the domain. For your remaining 'live' pages, I'd highly recommend taking the time to add 200+ words of unique content about the product in order to avoid this happening again.
An alternative solution would be to block the bots from accessing the /shop/ subfolder in your robots.txt file - and then setting up the shop and the currently active product listings on a different subdomain. You'd lose the ability to use the /shop/ folder, but it would be quicker than manually adding tags or 301 redirects.
That's the method I would use if I wanted to address the issue. However, this **may not be necessary **if your site is not performing badly. You can check this to a degree with the Panguin Tool - this overlays your organic traffic in analytics with Google updates - if a drop in traffic coincides with a Panda penalty, you may be under the affect of one - in which case you should take action ASAP.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi Zachery
29 pages showing up in your Moz crawl report out of 16,400 indexed pages on your site is such a small percentage (0.18% to be accurate) it is not worth worrying about. Also, if GWT is not reporting any issues I think you should be fine.
Don't worry, be happy!
Peter
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
-
Is using part of a meta description already on your site for another product considered duplicate?
I'm writing meta descriptions for this site, trying to keep them different, however, for two product types, I want to add the same info I added in the other likeminded product's meta descriptions. Is this ok as long as it's not the whole sentence or am I really to rewrite the same info another way, which is hard for " quick shipping available for x amount of colors ". Any Advice?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Query Strings causing Duplicate Content
I am working with a client that has multiple locations across the nation, and they recently merged all of the location sites into one site. To allow the lead capture forms to pre-populate the locations, they are using the query string /?location=cityname on every page. EXAMPLE - www.example.com/product www.example.com/product/?location=nashville www.example.com/product/?location=chicago There are thirty locations across the nation, so, every page x 30 is being flagged as duplicate content... at least in the crawl through MOZ. Does using that query string actually cause a duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | Rooted1 -
Do mobile and desktop sites that pull content from the same source count as duplicate content?
We are about to launch a mobile site that pulls content from the same CMS, including metadata. They both have different top-level domains, however (www.abcd.com and www.m.abcd.com). How will this affect us in terms of search engine ranking?
Technical SEO | | ovenbird0 -
Duplicate Content issue in Magento: The product pages are available true 3 URL's! How can we solve this?
Right now the product page "gedroogde goji bessen" (Dutch for: dried goji berries) is available true 3 URL's! **http://www.sportvoeding.net/gedroogde-goji-bessen ** =>
Technical SEO | | Zanox
By clicking on the product slider on the homepage
http://www.sportvoeding.net/superfood/gedroogde-goji-bessen =>
First go to sportvoeding.net/superfood (main categorie) and than clicking on "gedroogde Goji bessen"
http://www.sportvoeding.net/superfood/goji-bessen/gedroogde-goji-bessen =>
When directly go to the subcategorie "Goji Bessen" true the menu and there clicking on "gedroogde Goji Bessen" We want to have the following product URL:
http://www.sportvoeding.net/superfood/goji-bessen/gedroogde-goji-bessen Does someone know´s a good Exetension for this issue?0 -
Duplicate Content Due to Pagination
Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss. While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful... Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages. I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform. Thank you for taking the time to read my question!
Technical SEO | | josh3300 -
404 and Duplicate Content.
I just submitted my first campaign. And it's coming up with a LOT of errors. Many of them I feel are out of my control as we use a CMS for RV dealerships. But I have a couple of questions. I got a 404 error and SEO Moz tells me the link, but won't tell me where that link originated from, so I don't know where to go to fix it. I also got a lot of duplicate content, and it seems a lot of them are coming from "tags" on my blog. Is that something I should be concerned about? I will have a lot more question probably as I'm new to using this tool Thanks for the responses! -Brandon here is my site: floridaoutdoorsrv.com I welcome any advice or input!
Technical SEO | | floridaoutdoorsrv0 -
How to use internal tracking without causing duplicate content issues
Hi, We've been testing internal tracking for 4 weeks on a couple of pages using the basic string ?internalcampaign=X, but hese pages have started appearing in the search results. We don't currently have the facility to add canonical tags to correct this. Does anyone have any other solutions to this problem other than deleting the internal tracking or adding filters on the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NSJ780