Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
-
Hi Everyone,
I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob...
So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue:
Duplicate Page Title - Review:New
Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product
My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)?
My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this?
As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
-
Hi DakotahW,
Our store front is Volusion based as well and we recently began using Moz to aid in our efforts to improve our site SEO. We are experiencing the same problem with duplicate page content.
How did you go about correcting this issue? Do you have any advice on how we can avoid these errors?
-
1.) I can access the source code, and there is an option to override the default meta info for the review template using custom HTML - this is where I want to add the meta NOINDEX tag, correct?
Yes, sounds right
*also, it's pretty common sense but just to double check... if I add HTML to this field I'll want to paste the entire page's source code with the new robots meta tag included, not just the meta tag by itself, right?
Mmmm.... this sounds suspicious, especially if you are only editing the default meta info. You might need to do a little experimentation to figure this out.
2.) This is the direction where I was beginning to lean... in this case if the URL was "www.example.com/ReviewNew.asp?ProductCode=BLUEHAT13" would the parameter that identifies the reviews be "ReviewNew.asp" ?
The parameter here is "ProductCode" - which raises a good point. You want to make sure that this parameter isn't used by other page template, because you might block those as well.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi Cyrus,
Yes, each product page has a link to another page containing product review form they can fill out. And the more I continue to learn on the forum here, I'm beginning to understand why e-commerce platforms like Volusion aren't always the most friendly SEO-wise.
1.) I can access the source code, and there is an option to override the default meta info for the review template using custom HTML - this is where I want to add the meta NOINDEX tag, correct?
*also, it's pretty common sense but just to double check... if I add HTML to this field I'll want to paste the entire page's source code with the new robots meta tag included, not just the meta tag by itself, right?
2.) This is the direction where I was beginning to lean... in this case if the URL was "www.example.com/ReviewNew.asp?ProductCode=BLUEHAT13" would the parameter that identifies the reviews be "ReviewNew.asp" ?
Due to a growing lack of confidence in Volusion's out-of-the-box SEO features, I fear simply checking a box within their backend for a "one solution to all problems" may come back and bite me in the rear. I had briefly looked into parameter handling from Google Webmaster Tools and think this may be a better long-term solution. Not to mention, that I can at least identify when/where any issues originate from when/if they arise. Perhaps I'm beginning to outgrow my current shopping cart?
Anyways, thank you for the insightful response. Cheers!
-
Hi KLLC,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Making these pages no-index was my initial thought as it made the most sense. I know Volusion isn't the most SEO-friendly, so I think the biggest problem is understanding which of their out-of-the-box features can accomplish this without compromising how the rest of my site is crawlable. Again, thanks for the help!
-
Hi Dakotah,
If I understand correctly, you have multiple "leave a review" pages showing up in your SEOmoz reports, and each page is pretty much identical.
Yes, you are correct that you generally want to keep those pages out of the index.
Unfortunately, I don't believe Volusion is the most SEO friendly platform out of the box, and wrangling with it may require a bit of HTML knowledge
1. If you can access the source code, (using the LiveEdit function, perhaps?) it may serve you well to add a Meta NOINDEX tag to the head of your review template.
2. On the other hand, if this proves to technical, another option is parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools. You'll need a verified Webmaster account for this. You'd want to find, or enter, the parameter that identifies the reviews, i.e."?ProductCode=" and set googlebot to NO URLs.
Both of these options are both advanced and potentially dangerous. Back up your work and keep records of everything in case you need to make changes, or get someone to help.
Hope this helps. Let us know if you need more info, or if we're headed in the right direction. (Full disclosure - not many SEOs work with Volusion, so my knowledge is extremely limited)
-
Hello,
If you talk about SEOMoz crawler and the errors you get from your report, you must have basis changes for the critical issues. Example: you have added a review for each item page, tip: It must be built-in with the item page so that it will prevent you creating new pages with same title and ofcourse same content.
Second tip is if a review page follows to new page make that page nofollow, no-index so it will help or guide BOTS not to index these pages and your issue will be solved.
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
-
Web accessibility - High Contrast web pages, duplicate content and SEO
Hi all, I'm working with a client who has various URL variations to display their content in High Contrast and Low Contrast. It feels like quite an old way of doing things. The URLs look like this: domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/ - Default URL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=hc - High Contrast page
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=lc - Low Contrast page My questions are: Surely this content is duplicate content according to a search engine Should the different versions have a meta noindex directive in the header? Is there a better way of serving these pages? Thanks.0 -
Best Way to Incorporate FAQs into Every Page - Duplicate Content?
Hi Mozzers, We want to incorporate a 'Dictionary' of terms onto quite a few pages on our site, similar to an FAQ system. The 'Dictionary' has 285 terms in it, with about 1 sentence of content for each one (approximately 5,000 words total). The content is unique to our site and not keyword stuffed, but I am unsure what Google will think about us having all this shared content on these pages. I have a few ideas about how we can build this, but my higher-ups really want the entire dictionary on every page. Thoughts? Image of what we're thinking here - http://screencast.com/t/GkhOktwC4I Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Category Pages For Distributing Authority But Not Creating Duplicate Content
I read this interesting moz guide: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt, which I think answered my question but I just want to make sure. I take it to mean that if I have category pages with nothing but duplicate content (lists of other pages (h1 title/on-page description and links to same) and that I still want the category pages to distribute their link authority to the individual pages, then I should leave the category pages in the site map and meta noindex them, rather than robots.txt them. Is that correct? Again, don't want the category pages to index or have a duplicate content issue, but do want the category pages to be crawled enough to distribute their link authority to individual pages. Given the scope of the site (thousands of pages and hundreds of categories), I just want to make sure I have that right. Up until my recent efforts on this, some of the category pages have been robot.txt'd out and still in the site map, while others (with different url structure) have been in the sitemap, but not robots.txt'd out. Thanks! Best.. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Product with two common names: A separate page for each name, or both on one page?
This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention. I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc) Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible. Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution? Thanks for your help! Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Duplicate titles and descriptions problem?
We had an old site that used the urls for items site.com/32423432 we changed that to site.com/item name The old stuff has gone away and we have 301 redirects up. For some reason we are getting hit with duplicate titles on those pages and duplicate meta tags. The site relaunch was in November and we have a had a few problems but this just started showing up in the last week after having gone down. Any thoughts on a fix?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Multiple cities/regions websites - duplicate content?
We're about to launch a second site for a different, neighbouring city in which we are going to setup a marketing campaign to target sales in that city (which will also have a separate office there as well). We are going to have it under the same company name, but different domain name and we're going to do our best to re-write the text content as much as possible. We want to avoid Google seeing this as a duplicate site in any way, but what about: the business name the toll free number (which we would like to have same on both sites) the graphics/image files (which we would like to have the same on both sites) site structure, coding styles, other "forensic" items anything I might not be thinking of... How are we best to proceed with this? What about cross-linking the sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webdesignbarrie0