Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
-
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc...
This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about:
a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings.
b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page.
c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages.
d. ?
Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages.
Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
-
I see. I think the concern is with duplicate content though, right?
-
Either way, it will be tough to go that route and still get indexed. Its a pagination issue that everyone would like a solution to, but there just isnt one. It wont hurt you to do this, but wont ultimately get all those pages indexed like you want.
-
Disagree. I think you are missing out big time here- category pages are the bread and butter for eCommerce sites. Search engines have confirmed that these pages are of high value for users, and it gets you a chance to have optimized static content on a page that also shows product results. All the major e retailers heavily rely on these pages (Amazon, ebay, zappos, etc...)
-
Sorry, I don't think I clarified. The page title and meta descriptions would be unique, however they would be almost the same except for it saying "Page [x}" somewhere within it.
-
Option A doesnt do anything for you. I think the search engines flag duplicated title tags, even with different products on the page.
-
Thanks for the comprehensive response, Ryan; really great info here!
Would option A be out of the question in your mind due to the fact that the page attributes would be too similar even though unique content is on all the subsequent category pages? I know this method isn't typical, however, it would be the most efficient way to address.
Note: A big downside to this is also the fact that we will have multiple pages targeting the same keyword, however, since internally and externally, the main category pages are getting more link love, would it still hurt to have all those subsequent pages getting indexed?
-
Ahh... the ultimate IA question that still doesnt have a clear anwer from the search engines. A ton of talk about this at the recent SMX Advanced at Seattle (as is with almost every one). I will try and summarize the common sentiment that i gathered from other pros. I will not claim that this is the correct way, but for now this is what i heard a bunch of people agree on:
- No index, follow the pagination links for all except page 1
- Do not block/hand it with robots.txt (in your case, you realyl cant since you have no identifying parameters in your url)
- If you had paginated parameters in the url you can also manage those in the Google & Bing WMT by telling the SE to ignore those certain parameters.
- Canonical to page 1 was a strategy that some retailers were using, and other want to try. Google reps tried to say this is not the way to do it, but others claim success from it.
- If you have a "View All" link that would display all the products in a longer form on a single page, canonical to that page (if its reasonable)
Notes: Depending on how your results/pages are generated, you will need to remember that they probably arent passing "juice". Any dynamic content is usually not "flow through" links from an SEO perspective (or even crawled sometimes).
The better approach to not orphaning your product pages is finding ways to link to them from other sources besides the results pages. For larger sites, its a hassle, buts thats a challenge we all face
Here are some SEO tips for attacking the "orphan" issue:
- If you have product feeds, create a "deal" or "price change" feed. Create a twitter account that people can sign up for to follow these new deals or price changes on products. Push in your feed into tweets, and these will link to your product page, hence creating an in-link for search engines to follow.
- Can do the same with blogs or facebook, but not on a mass scale. Something a bit more useful for users like "top 10 deals of the week) and link to 10 products, or "Favorites for gifts" or something. over time, you can keep track of which product you recommend, and make sure you eventually hit all your products. Again, the point is creating at least 1 inbound link for search engines to follow.
- Create a static internal "product index page" (this is not for your sitemap page FYI) where either by category or some other structure, you make a static link to every product page you have on the site. Developers can have these links dynamically updated/inserted with some extra effort which will avoid manually needing to be updated.
- Create a xml sitemap index. Instead of everything being clumped into 1 xml sitemap for your site, try creating a sitemap index and with your product pages in their own sitemap. This may help with indexing those pages.
Hope that helps? Anyone else want to chime in?
-
I think that generally speaking you want to block search engines from indexing your category pages (use your sitemap and robots.txt to do this). I could be totally wrong here but that is how I setup my sites.
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
-
Home page vs inner page?
do you believe that the advantage of targeting a search term on the home page is now worse off than before? as I understand it ctr is a big factor now And as far as i can see if two pages are equal on page etc the better ctr will win out, the issue with the home page is the serp stars cannot be used hence the ctr on a product page will be higher? I feel if you where able to get a home page up quicker (1 year instead of two) you still lost out in the end due to the product page winning on ctr? do you think this is correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Ecommerce category pages
Hi there, I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I work on a lot of webshops that are made by the same company. I don't like to say this, but not all of their shops perform great SEO-wise. They use a filtering system which occasionally creates hundreds to thousands of category pages. Basically what happens is this: A client that sells fashion has a site (www.client.com). They have 'main categories' like 'Men' 'Women', 'Kids', 'Sale'. So when you click on 'men' in the main navigation, you get www.client.com/men/. Then you can filter on brand, subcategory or color. So you get: www.client.com/men/brand. Basically, the url follows the order in which you filter. So you can also get to 'brand' via 'category': www.client.com/shoes/brand Obviously, this page has the same content as www.client.com/brand/shoes or even /shoes/brand/black and /men/shoes/brand/black if all the brands' shoes happen to be black and mens' shoes. Currently this is fixed by a dynamic canonical system that canonicalizes the brand/category combinations. So there can be 8000 url's on the site, which canonicalize to about 4000 url's. I have a gut feeling that this is still not a good situation for SEO, and I also believe that it would be a lot better to have the filtering system default to a defined order, like /gender/category/brand/color so you don't even need to use these excessive amounts of canonicalization. Because, you can canonicalize the whole bunch, but you'd still offer thousands of useless pages for Google to waste its crawl budget on. Not to mention the time saved when crawling and analysing using Screaming Frog or other audit tools. Any opinions on this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Robots.txt: Syntax URL to disallow
Did someone ever experience some "collateral damages" when it's about "disallowing" some URLs? Some old URLs are still present on our website and while we are "cleaning" them off the site (which takes time), I would like to to avoid their indexation through the robots.txt file. The old URLs syntax is "/brand//13" while the new ones are "/brand/samsung/13." (note that there is 2 slash on the URL after the word "brand") Do I risk to erase from the SERPs the new good URLs if I add to the robots.txt file the line "Disallow: /brand//" ? I don't think so, but thank you to everyone who will be able to help me to clear this out 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Should we move a strong category page, or the whole domain to new domain?
We are debating moving a strong category page (and subcategory, product pages) from our current older domain to a new domain vs just moving the whole domain. The older domain has DA 40+, and the category page has PA 40+. Anyone with experience on how much PR etc will get passed to a virgin domain if we just redirect olddomain/strongcategorypage/ to newdomain.com? If the answer is little to none, we might consider just moving the whole site since the other categories are not that strong anyway. We will use 301 approach either way. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Durand0 -
Better to optimize page, post or category in WordPress
Hello, This question is for the WordPress experts out there. I've always wondered if it is better for SEO to focus on a particular keyword by writing a page or a post dedicated to it. For example, if I want to rank high for the keyword "Seattle rocks", do you think I'd be better off writing a page titled "Seattle rocks" or a post titled "Seattle rocks". The ideal for me would be to create a category with the URL that includes that keyword for my WordPress blog, but I do not know if I can do a good job in terms of SEO optimizing the keyword. For instance, if we consider the keyword in the example above, I'd create a category which will have the following URL: http://www.seomozthebest.com/category/seattle-rocks Do you think I can still focus on that keyword having such URL? As you know, WordPress would allow me to write some text in the description tag, which will be visible on the site. I guess that I could use the description box to create some optimized content using the keyword "Seattle rocks" and then launch a link building campaign using the anchor text "Seattle rocks" directing to the URL: http://www.seomozthebest.com/category/seattle-rocks Do you think that I can optimize the keyword by creating a category? Thank you for reading such long question. I tried to be as clear as possible. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Can I Use Cross Domain Canonical For Duplicate Categories & Product Pages?
I want to fix issue regarding duplicate categories & product pages on my multiple eCommerce websites. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas-fiberbuilt-umbrellas-llc-7gcrw-teal.html - Want to rank with this... http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/patio-umbrellas-fiberbuilt-umbrellas-llc-7gcrw-teal.html - Duplicate one! http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas - Want to rank with this... http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/patio-umbrellas - Duplicate one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Does using robots.txt to block pages decrease search traffic?
I know you can use robots.txt to tell search engines not to spend their resources crawling certain pages. So, if you have a section of your website that is good content, but is never updated, and you want the search engines to index new content faster, would it work to block the good, un-changed content with robots.txt? Would this content loose any search traffic if it were blocked by robots.txt? Does anyone have any available case studies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0