Duplicate block of text on category listings
-
Fellows,
We are deciding whether we should include our category description on all pages of the category listing - for example; page 1, page 2, page 3...
The category description is currently a few paragraphs of text that sits on page 1 of the category only at present. It also includes an image (linked to a large version of it) with appropriate ALT text.
Would we benefit from including this introductory text on the rest of the pages in the category? Or should we leave it on the first page only? Would it flag up duplicate signals?
Ideas please!
Thanks.
-
It's all about the content at the end of the day. The more content you can get out there for the products, the better off you will be. Just be careful not to spin content. Keep it as clean as possible
-
One of the category has over 65 pages. You're suggesting writing something unique for each page? It can be done...
-
No need to robots out any pages because this is a wasted opportunity to get more content in there. No, you shouldn't have the same content on multiple pages, but you can use these to have something fresh and unique relating to the main product.
How many pages are you talking about in total?
-
I would suggest to noindex,follow all the pages beyond page 1. This way the paginated pages will not show up as individual results in Google, but still pass on link juice to the items themselves.
This way the only thing you'd have to worry about is whether putting that category description up is helpful on these pages for your visitors, rather than have to worry about the search engines as well (the page won't be indexed anyway).
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
-
Defining duplicate content
If you have the same sentences or paragraphs on multiple pages of your website, is this considered duplicate content and will it hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mnapier120 -
Competition site with Duplicate Name
I have a client who is in real estate and one of his competition used the same Name and Domain and added the word Toronto in front. The competition is putting similar content on the website. The competition also hijacked the Google listing since they both work in the same building. Is this going to affect the ranking our website? What negative effect will it put on our website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaranX0 -
Robots.txt Blocking - Best Practices
Hi All, We have a web provider who's not willing to remove the wildcard line of code blocking all agents from crawling our client's site (user-agent: *, Disallow: /). They have other lines allowing certain bots to crawl the site but we're wondering if they're missing out on organic traffic by having this main blocking line. It's also a pain because we're unable to set up Moz Pro, potentially because of this first line. We've researched and haven't found a ton of best practices regarding blocking all bots, then allowing certain ones. What do you think is a best practice for these files? Thanks! User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: Crawl-delay: 5 User-agent: Yahoo-slurp Disallow: User-agent: bingbot Disallow: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /new_vehicle_detail.asp Disallow: /new_vehicle_compare.asp Disallow: /news_article.asp Disallow: /new_model_detail_print.asp Disallow: /used_bikes/ Disallow: /default.asp?page=xCompareModels Disallow: /fiche_section_detail.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReunionMarketing0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Is there a way to show random blocks of text to users without it affecting SEO? Cloaking for good?
My client has a pretty creative idea for his web copy. In the body of his page there will be a big block of text that contains random industry related terms but within that he will bold and colorize certain words that create a coherent sentence. Something to the effect of "cut through the noise with a marketing team that gets results". Get it? So if you were to read the paragraph word-for-word it would make no sense at all. It's basically a bunch of random words. He's worried this will affect his SEO and appear to be keyword stuffing to Google. My question is: Is there a way to block certain text on a webpage from search engines but show them to users? I guess it would be the opposite of cloaking? But it's still cloaking...isn't it? In the end we'll probably just make the block of text an image instead but I was just wondering if anyone has any creative solutions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheOceanAgency0 -
Duplicate content in Webmaster tools, is this bad?
We launched a new site, and we did a 301 redirect to every page. I have over 5k duplicate meta tags and title tags. It shows the old page and the new page as having the same title tag and meta description. This isn't true, we changed the titles and meta description, but it still shows up like that. What would cause that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Google local listing
I have a site and i registerd for local listing in google but i have not received any letter from google.It is second time i request for pin one month back and this time also did not received letter from google. what should i do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
Duplicate blog content and NOINDEX
Suppose the "Home" page of your blog at www.example.com/domain/ displays your 10 most recent posts. Each post has its own permalink page (where you have comments/discussion, etc.). This obviously means that the last 10 posts show up as duplicates on your site. Is it good practice to use NOINDEX, FOLLOW on the blog root page (blog/) so that only one copy gets indexed? Thanks, Akira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahirai0