Are the duplicate content and 302 redirects errors negatively affecting ranking in my client's OS Commerce site?

[Web-Incite]

I am working on an OS Commerce site and struggling to get it to rank even for the domain name. Moz is showing a huge number of 302 redirects and duplicate content issues but the web developer claims they can not fix those because ‘that is how the software in which your website is created works’. Have you any experience of OS Commerce? Is it the 302 redirects and duplicate content errors negatively affecting the ranking?

[Web-Incite]

Hi Chris,

There are 1259 temporary (302) redirects (the web designer has a problem changing them to 301 redirects and so has left the site like that). These redirects all point to the same page - the log-in page - (as one can not write reviews on products unless logged in). I am concerned that this may look like spam behavior and may be negatively affecting ranking.

I feel it is up to the web designer to complete the site (and remove the 302s) however the web designer considers their job complete. I am trying to decide weather to take on the challenge and try to sort out the site in osCommerce (of which I have no experience) or weather it is better to start a WordPress blog on a fresh domain to attract traffic until the site owner is ready to rewrite the site in a more SEO friendly format. Currently the site is indexed but will not rank for even the company name.

Thanks so much for you help.

Alison

[Chris_CM]

I would need to know more about the nature of the redirects to be able to say whether they would cause you any problems.  If they are chained, you will run into issues mentioned by Matt Cutts in this video.  Google has many signals to tell which sites are considered spam, and if you use the canonical references and have good quality content, I can't imagine redirects causing any red flags for your site.

Regards,

Chris

[Web-Incite]

Hi Chris,

That sounds great I had not seen that add on I will see if that helps. Do you think if I expend the time and effort to solve the duplicate content issues then the 301 redirects will not cause any problems or do you think they are causing Google to think the site is spammy?

Alison

[Chris_CM]

Hi Alison,

I'm not too familiar with osCommerce but there appear to be plugins allowing for canonical tags (http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/6578) that you might want to recommend to the designer.  Having the same product for different colors and sizes is a great use for the canonical tag, and my suggestion would be to designate the most popular color/size as the canonical version.  As for the duplicate content issues, I'm afraid my inexperience with osCommerce prevents me from giving any additional insight into that aspect of your problem.

For the redirects, if the pages being 302 redirected do not have many links pointing to them, the 302 redirects shouldn't be a problem.  You should focus on the canonical tags for now.

Regards,

Chris

[Web-Incite]

Hi Chris,

Thanks so much for your response.

The web designer has a problem applying 301 redirects and canonicalisation in osCommerce and I have limited experience osComerce. I do not want to waste time & clients money working on SEO (link building etc) when the site will not even rank for the domain name or exact product searches. I think the problems are more fundamental and lie in the design/implementation of the site. Crawl results show pages crawled 2,732, 250 Duplicate pages (same product in different colors / sizes etc), 1259 Temporary redirects. Do you think the duplicate pages are the problem or will it be the 302 redirects? Or is it both? Should I add more quality content ie a blog  to this domain in the hope of getting the rankings and traffic up or start the blog on a separate new domain away from these issues?

Any experience of SEO in osCommerce?

Alison

[Chris_CM]

The duplicate content is an issue if there are many versions of the same page on the site.  You may be able to mitigate some of the negative impact from this by designating one as the canonical version, but ideally you would want to 301 redirect the duplicate pages to the one that has built the highest pagerank.

As for the 302 redirects, I am under the impression that the redirects themselves will not hurt you, but any links to the pages that are being redirected will not pass link juice along to the redirect destination, whereas a 301 redirect would pass a large portion of that link juice (some still leaks even with a 301 redirect).

Hope that helps,

Chris Wilson