Category pages are treated as duplicate content - is that a problem?

[fhertzp]

Hi there

I have analyzing a webshop where we sell products for pets, gardening and the like. I am getting a lot of "Duplicate Content" alerts from Moz when doing a site crawl and I am told that the pages for e.g. cat products and gardening tools show duplicate content. Those two pages contain no identical products, so I am guessing that it is just the "set up" of the page (they look almost identical, except for the products). My question is: Is this really a problem? Does it affect my ranking in a negative way, and if so, how can I counter it?

Best regards

Frederik

[fhertzp]

It was a big help!

[fhertzp]

Thank you.

/Frederik

[Ria_]

If possible, I'd ensure that there's enough unique content on the category page in the form of a category description before and/or after the product listings. This can be done without looking like a hideous wall of text, if that's what you're thinking. It shouldn't be a long article.

I think this would help.

Consider running your site through http://siteliner.com too for a duplicate content analysis. It's free.

[fhertzp]

I see.

Is it a problem that the content is considered duplicate then, or can I just leave it the way it is?

Thank you, again.

Frederik

[Ria_]

If the pages are HTML-heavy with not much text content on the category pages, this could be why. Otherwise it's hard to tell without seeing the actual pages.

[fhertzp]

Thank you.

The former is the case. I have a page that is all cat products and a different page that is all garden products. Neither have snippets or anything other in common than the structure (and the header, search box, contact info etc.) But Moz tells me that the cat page has several duplicates, including the garden page.

[Ria_]

Just to clarify, do you mean that Moz is showing the cat category to be duplicate of the garden category?

Or that both the cat category and garden category are pages with duplicate content issues?

If the latter is correct, do your category pages have product description snippets? It could be that all that product content being pulled into the category content is causing the duplicate content. If this is the case, then you may want to bulk out your product pages a bit more to not be quite so thin.

I've also seen some ecommerce websites that list the entire category of products on each product page, in a Related section. So effectively, all the product pages within the category have duplicate content of the category page.

A similar thing happens with Wordpress blog posts if you don't noindex the right pages and have a very thin/flat structure. e.g. The main blog index will almost completely duplicate the most popular or main category archive page. Or the /2017/ archive, etc.