How Do You Deal With Duplicate Content On A Retail Site
-
Hi Guys
We make custom portfolios and boxes and every time we have a Moz site crawl, Rogerbot always returns a number of Duplicate Content Issues relating to different products.
As per the image below (which I hope is visible?!) Rogerbot has flagged duplicate content onto one product that relates to 5 other different products. For instance there is duplicate content for an A4 Leather Portfolio and an A3 Leather Portfolio and an 11"x17" Leather Portfolio. I can't redirect or canonicalise to just the A4 Portfolio as they are all individually different products.
The information on each page although similar, is relevant to each of the products, so rewriting a different blurb on each product page, will not be user friendly for our customers.
I could ignore the duplicate content issues, but then that isn't good practise (and also makes for a very unsatisfactory looking Dashboard!)
Any ideas??
Nick
-
Hi Tawny
Thanks very much, as it happens Nigel has posted a response that'll hopefully solve the issue and Roman has given me food for thought on another issue we have brewing.
Best Regards
Nick
-
Hi Nigel
Yet again, my thanks! A bit of a re-make, but it will be well worth it. Ironically, having sizes as attributes is something we used to do and was something that we thought we should go back to, so that's answered that question!
Thanks also for the advice re the tags.
Best Regards (and thanks again)
Nick
-
I agree with Nigel on this. It is easier then creating different content for each variation.
-
Hi There,
I work with a lot of eCommerce sites and Roman's answer is great when the problem is to have the same product in colour or size variations.
You just set up one page:
site/leather-portfolio
This is a single product in sizes A3, A4 and 11"x17. create a page with the URL as shown then have 'attributes' on the page for sizes. Typically the attribute will be held behind a # or similar so will not be indexable. The canonical would just be site/leather-portfolio and the three sizes would be in the form of a drop down or swatches on a single page. Combine all of the text you would have spread over the pages on to this one making it super smart for SEO
Also, make sure that tags are non-indexable or canonicalized otherwise those sizes may append themselves to multiple URLs causing endless duplication.
Regards Nigel
-
Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here.
Shoot! You've already ruled out the only suggestions I have: either using the canonical tag to tell search engines (and our crawler) which version of the page has the best info on it and should rank highest, or add in some extra content on each page to differentiate them from one another.
Our tool has a 90% tolerance for duplicate content, meaning it'll flag anything that's 90% similar or more at the source code level, not just the viewable text on the page. In order to stop getting these duplicate content issues, you'll need to find some way of making each of those pages different enough from one another that they're not fighting each other for rankings anymore.
If you don't want to add a canonical tag or more text to the pages, the last option would be to just Ignore the issue in your Dashboard. If you do that, we'll stop reporting duplicate content issues for those pages going forward—we'll just ignore that class of issue for those pages. It won't fix the issue for search engines, but it would help you clean up your Moz Pro Dashboard.
I know that's not super helpful—I really wish I had some better advice to offer! Maybe one of our esteemed community members will have a suggestion for you that'll do the trick. If you want to follow up or have more questions for us, feel free to reach out to [email protected] and we'll do our best to answer all your questions.
-
A Good option for dealing with duplicate content is to use the rel=canonical attribute. This tells search engines that a given page should be treated as though it were a copy of a specified URL, and all of the links, content metrics, and "ranking power" that search engines apply to this page should actually be credited to the specified URL.
Lets take an Iphone7 as example, you have one product with differents option 64GB, 128GB with 3 color variations, so you create a "master page" in simple words you should create some master page where you put all your seo efforts and tell the crawler ignore the other ones
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
-
Open Site Explorer external + follow links percentage
Hi how are you my root domain according to open site explorer has 90% of total links, external + follow. whereas my competitors have 5 - 6% how do I get this down to look more natural. Also what does this metric mean and how do I work out the percentage? Also I only have around 100 pages on my website which is a Shopify store and I have a small amount of internal followed links is this important for an ecommerce website as it is small number in comparison to my competitors. Thank you regards Adam
Link Explorer | | hourspy1 -
Do other sites linking to my page with a low domain authority affect my rankings?
Hello, my page authority 30, I see other page with an authority of 21 for example linking to us. Is this good or bad, does this affect our ranking? A lot of these don't have anchor text, I'm guessing we should reach out to these webmaster to include anchor text with the keywords we want to drive traffic to this page or make as descriptive as possible? Thanks! Laura
Link Explorer | | lauramrobinson320 -
Duplicated content detected with MOZ crawl with canonical applied
Hi there! I have a slight problem.
Link Explorer | | Eurasmus.com
I have a site with Joomla 3.3 that we recently migrated from 2.5. Joomla, for some reason that I don´t really get, creates hundreds of weird urls for the site like
mydomain.com/en -> joomla creates en/home/149-xxx-xxx/xxxxxx-xxxxxx that links to the first one.
The new version 3.3 knows this bug and applies a rel=canonical to the ones created "artificially", so they should not be identified as duplicated. Sample piece of code: en/home/149-all-en/xxxxxxx-xxxxxx" rel="canonical" / MOZ crawler identifies this as duplicated and like this I have thousands of pages duplicated all with titles, content etc... all the ones created by joomla. Still my site has good SEO results and I can not see any penalties but I am a bit concerned they may come in the future.... Can anyone explain me what is happening? Thank you in advance for your time,0 -
Open Site Explorer Question
Hello Mozers. It has been a while 🙂 OK - I run an open site explorer report, toggle over to 'Linking Domains' because I am more interested in the number of actual websites that link to my client rather than the number of links my client has (and of course what websites are linking) and although I have been doing this for years there is one little thing I am a bit confused about. The report shows (from left to right) the 'Linking Root Domain", the "Domain Authority" for the linking domain and then the 'Number of Linking Root Domains" for each 'Linking Root Domain" My question is (rather stupid, I am sure) is the number of linking root domains for each linking root domain the number of websites linking to them OR the number of websites to which they link?
Link Explorer | | Vizergy1 -
Why does the number of the total external links and the followed linking root domains between Open site explorer and the campaign in Moz pro doesn't match?
Opensiteexplorer returns 52.473 total external links and 715 followed linking root domains while my campaign in Moz analytics return 35.899 total external links and 1092 followed linking root domains. Does anyone knows how this is possible?
Link Explorer | | ConversionMobstars0 -
Why is my website providing no feedback on the Open Site Explorer?
Basically, whenever i type in my URL, http://www.locksmithplusincportlandor.com, I am presented with the following message: "It looks like we haven't discovered established link data for this URL yet." I have gone through all of the reasons why this could be, and none of them apply to my current situation. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Link Explorer | | Meier0 -
Open Site Explorer Not Showing Full Pro Version
Um, could someone please let me know why OpenSiteExplorer is treating me like I don't pay $200 for a Moz Pro Membership? See screenshot attached VdCrxzY
Link Explorer | | RickyShockley0 -
Moz & Other Sites Not Showing in Link Profile?
I'm curious to know why Moz, YouTube, G+ and some other links are not showing the OSE link profile as NOFOLLOW or DOFOLLOW for our website whiteboardcreations.com? When doing analysis, we see a lot of companies YouTube pages with their NF link and G+ page links and even see a lot of the Moz community members with their Profile pages showing the NF link or the DF links. I'm confused as to why OSE is not picking up any of our links from those respective sites. Any thoughts? Thank you in advance. - Patrick
Link Explorer | | WhiteboardCreations0