Duplicate content hidden behind tabs
-
Just looking at an ecommerce website and they've hidden their product page's duplicate content behind tabs on the product pages - not on purpose, I might add.
Is this a legitimate way to hide duplicate content, now that Google has lowered the importance and crawlability of content hidden behind tabs? Is this a legitimate tactic to tackle duplicate content?
Your thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, Luke
-
Thanks for your feedback Beau and Jordan - very helpful
Luke
-
Hey Luke,
General rule or theory is that content behind tabs is "indexed but discounted" due to it not being visible without some digging. In the wild, I've seen e-commerce websites move both towards tabs (less for the reasons that you mentioned and more for sortability & end-user experience needs) or away from tabs (letting the content & product specs work for the site in terms of crawl and relevance on search). A good example of the latter would be Amazon.
Hope this answers your question fully.
-Beau
-
I would think you would want to create unique content and either remove duplicate content or implement rel=canonicals. I would imagine hiding duplicated content could be seen as manipulative to Google.
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
-
How bad is duplicate content for ecommerce sites?
We have multiple eCommerce sites which not only share products across domains but also across categories within a single domain. Examples: http://www.artisancraftedhome.com/sinks-tubs/kitchen-sinks/two-tone-sinks/medium-rounded-front-farmhouse-sink-two-tone-scroll http://www.coppersinksonline.com/copper-kitchen-and-farmhouse-sinks/two-tone-kitchen-farmhouse-sinks/medium-rounded-front-farmhouse-sink-two-tone-scroll http://www.coppersinksonline.com/copper-sinks-on-sale/medium-rounded-front-farmhouse-sink-two-tone-scroll We have selected canonical links for each domain but I need to know if this practice is having a negative impact on my SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArtisanCrafted0 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
Duplicate Content / Canonical Conundrum on E-Commerce Website
Hi all, I’m looking for some expert advice on use of canonicals to resolve duplicate content for an e-Commerce site. I’ve used a generic example to explain the problem (I do not really run a candy shop). SCENARIO I run a candy shop website that sells candy dispensers and the candy that goes in them. I sell about 5,000 different models of candy dispensers and 10,000 different types of candy. Much of the candy fits in more than one candy dispenser, and some candy dispensers fit exactly the same types of candy as others. To make things easy for customers who need to fill up their candy dispensers, I provide a “candy finder” tool on my website which takes them through three steps: 1. Pick your candy dispenser brand (e.g. Haribo) 2. Pick your candy dispenser type (e.g. soft candy or hard candy) 3. Pick your candy dispenser model (e.g. S4000-A) RESULT: The customer is then presented with a list of candy products that they can buy. on a URL like this: Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A All of these steps are presented as HTML pages with followable/indexable links. PROBLEM: There is a duplicate content issue with the results pages. This is because a lot of the candy dispensers fit exactly the same candy (e.g. S4000-A, S4000-B and S4000-C). This means that the content on these pages are the basically same because the same candy products are listed. I’ll call these the “duplicate dispensers” E.g. Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-B Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-C The page titles/headings change based on the dispenser model, but that’s not enough for the pages to be deemed unique by Moz. I want to drive organic traffic searches for the dispenser model candy keywords, but with duplicate content like this I’m guessing this is holding me back from any of these dispenser pages ranking. SOLUTIONS 1. Write unique content for each of the duplicate dispenser pages: Manufacturers add or discontinue about 500 dispenser models each quarter and I don’t have the resources to keep on top of this content. I would also question the real value of this content to a user when it’s pretty obvious what the products on the page are. 2. Pick one duplicate dispenser to act as a rel=canonical and point all its duplicates at it. This doesn’t work as dispensers get discontinued so I run the risk of randomly losing my canonicals or them changing as models become unavailable. 3. Create a single page with all of the duplicate dispensers on, and canonical all of the individual duplicate pages to that page. e.g. Canonical: candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series Duplicates (which all point to canonical): candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=A candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=B candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=C PROPOSED SOLUTION Option 3. Anyone agree/disagree or have any other thoughts on how to solve this problem? Thanks for reading.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webmethod0 -
Duplicate Internal Content on E-Commerce Website
Hi, I find my e-commerce pharmacy website is full of little snippets of duplicate content. In particular: -delivery info widget repeated on all the product pages -product category information repeated product pages (e.g. all medicines belonging to a certain category of medicines have identical side effects and I also include a generic snippet of the condition the medicine treats) Do you think it will harm my rankings to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deelo5550 -
Duplicate Content for Deep Pages
Hey guys, For deep, deep pages on a website, does duplicate content matter? The pages I'm talk about are image pages associated with products and will never rank in Google which doesn't concern me. What I'm interested to know though is whether the duplicate content would have an overall effect on the site as a whole? Thanks in advance Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao1 -
Best practice with duplicate content. Cd
Our website has recently been updated, now it seems that all of our products pages look like this cdnorigin.companyname.com/catagory/product Google is showing these pages within the search. rather then companyname.com/catagory/product Each product page does have a canaonacal tag on that points to the cdnorigin page. Is this best practice? i dont think that cdnorigin.companyname etc looks very goon in the search. is there any reason why my designer would set the canonical tags up this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate Content across 4 domains
I am working on a new project where the client has 5 domains each with identical website content. There is no rel=canonical. There is a great variation in the number of pages in the index for each of the domains (from 1 to 1250). OSE shows a range of linking domains from 1 to 120 for each domain. I will be strongly recommending to the client to focus on one website and 301 everything from the other domains. I would recommend focusing on the domain that has the most pages indexed and the most referring domains but I've noticed the client has started using one of the other domains in their offline promotional activity and it is now their preferred domain. What are your thoughts on this situation? Would it be better to 301 to the client's preferred domain (and lose a level of ranking power throught the 301 reduction factor + wait for other pages to get indexed) or stick with the highest ranking/most linked domain even though it doesn't match the client's preferred domain used for email addresses etc. Or would it better to use cross-domain canoncial tags? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Subdomains - duplicate content - robots.txt
Our corporate site provides MLS data to users, with the end goal of generating leads. Each registered lead is assigned to an agent, essentially in a round robin fashion. However we also give each agent a domain of their choosing that points to our corporate website. The domain can be whatever they want, but upon loading it is immediately directed to a subdomain. For example, www.agentsmith.com would be redirected to agentsmith.corporatedomain.com. Finally, any leads generated from agentsmith.easystreetrealty-indy.com are always assigned to Agent Smith instead of the agent pool (by parsing the current host name). In order to avoid being penalized for duplicate content, any page that is viewed on one of the agent subdomains always has a canonical link pointing to the corporate host name (www.corporatedomain.com). The only content difference between our corporate site and an agent subdomain is the phone number and contact email address where applicable. Two questions: Can/should we use robots.txt or robot meta tags to tell crawlers to ignore these subdomains, but obviously not the corporate domain? If question 1 is yes, would it be better for SEO to do that, or leave it how it is?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0