Duplicate Content Dilemma for Category and Brand Pages
-
Hi,
I have a online shop with categories such as:
- Trousers
- Shirts
- Shoes
- etc.
But now I'm having a problem with further development.
I'd like to introduce brand pages. In this case I would create new categories for Brand 1, Brand 2, etc... The text on categories and brand pages would be unique. But there will be an overlap in products.How do I deal with this from a duplicate content perspective?
I'm appreciate your suggestions.
Best, Robin
-
Wow. I did some research. I stand corrected. Thanks, Linda.
As far as your categories go, you could have:
www.Domain.com/computers/notebooks/apple-notebooks/
and
www.domain.com/apple-products/
On your category pages, I'd suggest adding unique content at the bottom of the category pages. A paragraph above the fold would help for ranking purposes, but may detract from usability and conversions.
-
Thank you for the time you've invested in this answer. This gives me a good sense on what to do.
I like option 2 the best. But not sure whether I got it right. What do you think of the following scenario (taking the Apple example you provided):
- I have a category page with notebooks. The title, description and text on this category is focusing on notebooks in general. The products include Dell, HP and Apple.
=> This is basically the setup, which I have in my shop right now. - Now I want to create a brand page for Apple. There the title, description and text is focused on Apple in general. The products include Apple Notebooks, iPhones, iPads ect.
Now here's the point: Title, description and text for the notebook category and Apple brand page will be different (unique content). But products are part of content too, aren't they? And since there will be a overlap in products, this would result in duplicate content for featured products.
But I want both pages to rank. One for 'notebook' and the other one for 'apple'.
Is that possible, or are partially overlapping products in those 2 categories a dealbreaker for my SEO?
- I have a category page with notebooks. The title, description and text on this category is focusing on notebooks in general. The products include Dell, HP and Apple.
-
According to Moz: "Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to utilize the rel=canonical tag. The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and often takes much less development time to implement." http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
Why do you think it does not pass ranking power?
-
This is a difficult question. I would agree with patrick_g that canonicals are one way to handle duplicate content, but canonicals don't pass link juice to the parent, unless it's through a link.
The canonical tag only tells google which page to index. It does not transfer link juice as does a 301 redirect. Read up on this.
Here are some good choices:
1. if the brands are only for use experience purposes, you could make the pages noindex, follow. This would eliminate the duplicate content issue, and the brands could serve as a link juice hub. They would be kept out of google's index, but would still pass link juice.
2. Create unique content for the brand pages, and give them a title tag and content that differs from the competing page. For example if you already have an "Apple" page, make the new page "Certified Apple Products" (or some other KW).
3. This one requires some programming skill, and is a little controversial. Put the new pages in a parent folder "/hide/" (don't actually use the word "hide"). Put all the new pages in that folder, and disallow the parent folder in robots.txt. Any links on your site to these pages would pass link juice to these pages, which would be lost, and could be a significant link juice drain. Here's the controversial part - put the links to those pages in an iframe, and disallow the iframe folder in robots.txt. This would prevent bots from crawling those links and passing link juice.
-
Hello soralsokal,
I don't have a bunch of products like you, but generally I prefer to use the rel=canocial tag to push the link juice to the one category page I'm trying to get ranked well. So I still build out the various pages I want, but don't expect the duplicate content to be ranked.
I suppose you could also put them in your Robots.txt file to block them from search engines. I've done that with a blog that packed the blog posts in all sort of different categories, thus creating duplicate content.
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
-
Identifying Duplicate Content
Hi looking for tools (beside Copyscape or Grammarly) which can scan a list of URLs (e.g. 100 pages) and find duplicate content quite quickly. Specifically, small batches of duplicate content, see attached image as an example. Does anyone have any suggestions? Cheers. 5v591k.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Why does my ecommerce category page have such low PA?
I'm a bit of a newbie to the game and I've learnt a lot over the past couple of days with a Moz subscription. I'm starting to put together a strategy to improve our SEO performance and get our site ranking higher for some specific terms. We have a low domain authority at 25. The page I am concerned about is one of our main product categories, link here. About a year and half a go we changed our domain name and did a 301 redirect on all our category, products and content pages. Would this have affected anything? These redirects are still in place. I also notice OSE shows now inbound links. I'm almost certain there are a few around though. Most recently we've been investing in unique descriptions for all products in this category at around 60 words per product, this excludes the product features in a tabular format. I appreciate this isn't many words. I have also read a lot about faceted navigation and this category suffers from a very flat product structure were facet navigation is used heavily by the user to find a product that matches their requirements. Does anybody have any ideas about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
Hello, We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools. However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below https://www.google.com.au/search?espv=2&q=site%3Awww.mypetwarehouse.com.au+inurl%3Agclid&oq=site%3A&gs_l=serp.3.0.35i39l2j0i67l4j0i10j0i67j0j0i131.58677.61871.0.63823.11.8.3.0.0.0.208.930.0j3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..8.3.419.nUJod6dYZmI Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation? Thanks, Stephen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyPetWarehouse0 -
Duplicate content in external domains
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
I have been asking about this case before, but now my question is different.
We have a new school that offers courses and programs . Its website is quite new (just a five months old) It is very common between these schools to publish the courses and programs in training portals to promote those courses and to increase the visibility of them. As the website is really new, I found when I was doing the technical audit, that when I googled a text snipped from the site, the new school website was being omitted, and instead, the course portals are being shown. Of course, I know that the best recommendation would be to create a different content for that purpose, but I would like to explore if there is more options. Most of those portals doesn't allow to place a link to the website in the content and not to mention canonical. Of course most of them are older than the new website and their authority is higher. so,... with this situation, I think the only solution is to create a different content for the website and for the portals.
I was thinking that maybe, If we create the content first in the new website, send it to the index, and wait for google to index it, and then send the content to the portals, maybe we would have more opportunites to not be ommited by Google in search results. What do you think? Thank you!0 -
How can a website have multiple pages of duplicate content - still rank?
Can you have a website with multiple pages of the exact same copy, (being different locations of a franchise business), and still be able to rank for each individual franchise? Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OhYeahSteve0 -
Which duplicate content should I remove?
I have duplicate content and am trying to figure out which URL to remove. What should I take into consideration? Authority? How close to the root the page is? How clear the path is? Would appreciate your help! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ocularis0 -
Duplicate page content and duplicate pate title
Hi, i am running a global concept that operates with one webpage that has lot of content, the content is also available on different domains, but with in the same concept. I think i am getting bad ranking due to duplicate content, since some of the content is mirrored from the main page to the other "support pages" and they are almost 200 in total. Can i do some changes to work around this or am i just screwed 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smartmedia0 -
Accepting RSS feeds. Does it = duplicate content?
Hi everyone, for a few years now I've allowed school clients to pipe their news RSS feed to their public accounts on my site. The result is a daily display of the most recent news happening on their campuses that my site visitors can browse. We don't republish the entire news item; just the headline, and the first 150 characters of their article along with a Read more link for folks to click if they want the full story over on the school's site. Each item has it's own permanent URL on my site. I'm wondering if this is a wise practice. Does this fall into the territory of duplicate content even though we're essentially providing a teaser for the school? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterdbaron0