Duplicate Page Title problems with Product Catalogues (Categories, Subcategories etc.)
-
Hey guys,
I've done a fair bit of Googling and "mozzing" and can't seem to find a definitive solution. In our product catalogue on our site we have multiple ways to access the product for navigation purposes, and SeoMoz is throwing up hundreds of duplicate page title errors which are basically just different ways to get to the same product yet it sees it as a "separate page" and thus duplicating itself.
Is this just SeoMoz confusing itself or does Google actually see it this way too?
For example, a product might be:
www.example.com/region/category/subcategory/
www.example.com/region2/category/subcategory/
www.example.com/region/category/subcategory2/
etc. Is the only solution to have the product ONLY listed in one combination? This kind of kills our ability to have easy refinement for customers browsing the catalogue, i.e: something that falls under the "Gifts for Men" might also be a match for "Father's Day Gifts" or "Gifts for Dad" etc.
Any solution or advice is greatly appreciated, cheers
-
Google looks at URLs, and not pages. It's the same content, but on different URLs.
If Google delivered mail, it would think the following were all different houses:
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main St., Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210-1234If you're able to use a canonical tag in your custom CMS, you can effectively tell Google that one specific URL is the "right" one, and that all of the others should be treated as if they were the "right" one.
-
Hi Chris,
We aren't using a standardised CMS as our system was built from the ground up by our in-house development team several years ago so I can't give you an exact framework to go by unfortunately.
And yes, Webmaster Tools returns errors for duplication, i.e (i'll give you a sample URL path) we get duplicate title errors for different paths to navigate to the same product:
/jungle-surfing-through-the-daintree-rainforest/jungle-adventures-nightwalks/port-douglas/day-tours/jungle-surfing-canopy-tours/jungle-adventures-nightwalks
In other words, people are finding the raw Operator -> Product link organically and can land there via that route, or they can navigate through our catalogue by
Region -> Category -> Operator -> Product
...but in the end it's the same page they are landing on regardless.
Kind of hard to explain but hope that helps some.
Thanks!
-
Hi Ben,
What CMS are you using for your e-commerce platform e.g. Magento, oscommerce?
If you can let me know what you are using I might be able to help you out a bit more.
Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any duplication issues?
-
I Think this will help you
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ecommerce-seo-making-product-pages-into-great-content-whiteboard-friday
http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-on-ecommerce-sites
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-you-avoid-duplicate-content-within-your-own-e-commerce-website
Remember to use
use rel=canonical as well
I want to ask you a quick question as well is this actually affecting your site what is your page rank? What is your Moz rank? How old is your domain? If your website is ranking well chances are Google understands that it is a e-commerce website and is not penalizing you as it would another type site. If you are being penalized by me know. You may also want to employee majestic SEO tools to look your link profile history in addition to the excellent tools found here. Remember you always have one private question every month if you're a pro member to ask the staff. I hope that it does not come to that however I do SEO on e-commerce sites and just use different descriptions never spin the content though make it fresh every time.
All the best,
Tom
-
- Okay I think I have an answer for you. If you are an e-commerce website and you are having issues with duplicate content because of the reasons you've given let's say the main page shows everything shirts, then another page has blue shirts so the URL like HTTP://example.com/shirts and the blue shirt will be in a URL something like this HTTP://example.com/shirts/blue
- I believe this is forgivable however I would build my site out to reflect a new category and have the wording be unique for each so my blue shirt's description would be different on shirts that would be on shirts/blue I hope that makes some sense however I do believe that there is a whiteboard Friday just after Google dropped Penguin in our lap where Rand discusses this I will look for and add it to this if I can find it however if you look in the search box here on Moz you will want to type in something to the tune of "things we should not worry about after Penguin" now you have to understand I do not recall this exactly so I sincerely hope to you & let me know if I can and help you anymore.
- Respectfully,
- Thomas von Zickell
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
-
Topical keywords for product pages and blogs
Hi all, I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank. However, duplicate content is of course still an issue. So here's my question: A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website: Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally. You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions. But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page. So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well. Any ideas on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Paginated category pages still showing in Google
Despite our blog using rel=next and rel=”prev” we’re still finding paginated pages getting impressions in Google, suggesting they are taking up unnecessary crawl budget. An example is: https://www.theukdomain.uk/seo/page/2/ What steps would you recommend I take to most benefit my sites SEO? Thanks, Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sjefferies0 -
SEO Impact & Google Impact On Removing Product From Category Page for Ecommerce Site
Hello Experts, For my Ecommerce site previously I was showing products at category pages i.e. first all subcategories name after that list all products of all subcateogries. That also approx per category 500 products via load more feature. My query is now I am planning to show products only at Product Listing Page and not on Category pages so what will be SEO impact and how google will treat this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johny123450 -
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 -
Does >70 character title tag affect a pages ranking in search?
We are a publication that puts out hundreds of articles a month. We have +5000 medium priority errors showing that our title element tags are too long. The title tag is structured like this: [Headine] | [Publication Name that is 23 characters] . However, since we are a publication, it's not practical for us to try to limit the length of our title tags to 70 characters or less because doing so would make the titles of our content seem very unnatural. We also don't want to remove the branding because we want it to go with the article when it's shared (and to appear when some titles are short enough to allow room in SERPs). I understand the reasons for limiting characters to 70 or less with regard to SERP friendliness. We try to keep key phrases in the front. People are more likely to click on a page if they know what it's about etc etc. My question is, do the longer titles affect the ability for the page to rank in search? To put it a different way, if we altered all the +5000 of the title tags to fit within 70 characters, would the page authorities and our site's domain authority increase? I'd like to avoid needed to clean up 5000 pages if the medium priority errors aren't really hurting us. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CatBrain1 -
Solution to Duplicate Pages within Shopify
Thanks in advance for your time and expertise. I am having issues with duplicate page content and titles on a client's Shopify subdomain. Examples below. Two questions: #1 How can I solve this issue? Do I block the duplicate pages from being crawled? With meta NoIndex? Establish the main page as the canonical version and stop obsessing? Other... #2 Is it a big concern or am I needlessly obsessing? Feels like a concern that needs to be addressed, but maybe not? Duplicate Page Content Examples: #1 URL: http://shop.shopvandevort.com #1 Duplicate URLs: http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/all; http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/all?page=1 #2 URL: http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/accessories #2 Duplicate URLs: http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/accessories; http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/types?q=Accessories Duplicate Page Title Examples: http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/vendors?q=For%20Love%20And%20Lemons http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/for-love-lemons http://shopvandevort.com/blog/tag/for-love-and-lemons/ http://shop.shopvandevort.com/collections/for-love-lemons?page=1 Thanks again for taking a look here, very much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronHurst0 -
What is the best practice for URLs for E-commerce products in multiple categories?
Hello all! I have always worked successfully with SEO on E-commerce sites, however we are currently revamping an older site for a client and so I thought I'd turn to the community to ask what the best practices that you guys are experiencing for url structures at the moment. Obviously we do not wish to create duplicate content and so the big question is, what would you guys do for the very best structure for URLs on an E-commerce site that has products in multiple categories? Let's imagine we are selling toy cars. I have a sports car for sale, so naturally it can go in the sports cars category and it could also go in to the convertibles category too. What is the best way you have found recently that works and increases rankings, but does not create duplicate content? Thanks in advance! 🙂 Kind Regards, JDM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hatfish0 -
Does duplicate content penalize the whole site or just the pages affected?
I am trying to assess the impact of duplicate content on our e-commerce site and I need to know if the duplicate content is affecting only the pages that contain the dupe content or does it affect the whole site? In Google that is. But of course. Lol
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100