Removing Duplicate Content Issues in an Ecommerce Store
-
Hi All
OK i have an ecommerce store and there is a load of duplicate content which is pretty much the norm with ecommerce store setups
e.g. this is my problem
http://www.mystoreexample.com/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/brandname/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/appliancetype/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/brandname/appliancetype/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/appliancetype/brandname/product1.htmlso all the above lead to the same product
I also want to keep the breadcrumb path to the productHere's my plan
Add a canonical URL to the product page
e.g. http://www.mystoreexample.com/product1.html
This way i have a short product URLNoindex all duplicate pages but do follow the internal links so the pages are spidered
What are the other options available and recommended?
Does that make sense?
Is this what most people are doing to remove duplicate content pages?thanks
-
Recently we had the same situation which was resolved nicely with rel canonical alone.
-
Happy to reply, it might be sad but I quite enjoy it.
If it was a smaller site I would say pick your best performing page and use that, but given how many pages I imagine you have that's going to be pretty much impossible. I would go with domain/brand/product (provided that the brand is a keyword and the total isn't too long) that way if people link using just the URL you get another keyword into the mix.
If appliance type makes better sense go with that, just don't make it too long.
EDIT: and yes if you provide a canonical link to the page you want credited you won't have to worry about the noindexing (sorry forgot that bit).
-
thanks Tompt i appreciate you taking time to reply
do you think its best i keep a short URL as the preferred option or follow a breadcrumb and use that option
e.g. URL.com/brand/appliancetype/product1.html
or have the canonical URL as URL.com/product1.html
if i dont noindex the pages but do provide a canonical link on the page will this remove my duplicate content headache?
-
That makes sense and it sounds like you're going about things the right way, but do you really need to noindex the items?
Could you not add the canonical URL to all of the pages? So add http://www.mystoreexample.com/brand/product1.html to any page that features the content? That way you preserve your links and keep your site more open to the spiders?
That would be my only suggestion.
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
-
Duplicate content in external domains
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
I have been asking about this case before, but now my question is different.
We have a new school that offers courses and programs . Its website is quite new (just a five months old) It is very common between these schools to publish the courses and programs in training portals to promote those courses and to increase the visibility of them. As the website is really new, I found when I was doing the technical audit, that when I googled a text snipped from the site, the new school website was being omitted, and instead, the course portals are being shown. Of course, I know that the best recommendation would be to create a different content for that purpose, but I would like to explore if there is more options. Most of those portals doesn't allow to place a link to the website in the content and not to mention canonical. Of course most of them are older than the new website and their authority is higher. so,... with this situation, I think the only solution is to create a different content for the website and for the portals.
I was thinking that maybe, If we create the content first in the new website, send it to the index, and wait for google to index it, and then send the content to the portals, maybe we would have more opportunites to not be ommited by Google in search results. What do you think? Thank you!0 -
Duplicate content - Images & Attachments
I have been looking a GWT HTML improvements on our new site and I am scratching my head on how to stop some elements of the website showing up as duplicates for Meta Descriptions and Titles. For example the blog area: <a id="zip_0-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>This blog is full of information and resources for you to implement; get more traffic, more leads an /blog//blog/page/2//blog/page/3//blog/page/4//blog/page/6//blog/page/9/The page has rel canonicals on them (using Yoast Wordpress SEO) and I can't see away of stopping the duplicate content. Can anyone suggest how to combat this? or is there nothing to worry about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Is This Considered Duplicate Content?
My site has entered SEO hell and I am not sure how to fix it. Up until 18 months ago I had tremendous success on Google and Bing and now my website appears below my Facebook page for the term "Direct Mail Raleigh." What makes it even more frustrating is my competitors have done no SEO and they are dominating this keyword. I thought that the issue was due to harmful inbound links and two months ago I disavowed ones that were clearly spam. Somehow my site has actually gone down! I have a blog that I have updated infrequently and I do not know if it I am getting punished for duplicate content. On Google Webmaster Tools it says I have 279 crawled and indexed pages. Yesterday when I ran the MOZ crawl check I was amazed to find 1150 different webpages on my site. Despite the fact that it does not appear on the webmaster tools I have three different webpages due to the format that the Wordpress blog was created: "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/part2leadershi/", "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/page/91/" and "http://www.marketplace-solutions.com/report/category/competent-leadership/page/3/" What does not make sense to me is why Google only indexed 279 webpages AND why MOZ did not identify these three webpages as duplicate content with the Crawl Test Tool. Does anyone have any ideas? Would it be as easy as creating a massive robot.txt file and just putting 2 of the 3 URLs in that file? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DR700950 -
Should I redirect all my subdomains to a single unique subdomain to eliminate duplicate content?
Hi there! I've been working on http://duproprio.com for a couple of years now. In the early stages of the website, we've put into place a subdomain wildcard, that allowed us to create urls like this on the fly : http://{some-city}.duproprio.com This brought us instantly a lot of success in terms of traffic due to the cities being great search keywords. But now, business has grown, and as we all know, duplicate content is the devil so I've been playing with the idea of killing (redirecting) all those urls to their equivalent on the root domain. http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 would redirect to equivalent page at : http://duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 Even if my redirections are 301 permanent, there will be some juice lost for each link redirected that are actually pointing to my old subdomains This would also imply to redirect http://www.duproprio.com to http://duproprio.com. Which is probably the part I'm most anxious about since the incoming links are almost 50/50 between those 2 subdomains... Bringing everything back into a single subdomain is the thing to do in order to get all my seo juice together, this part is obvious... But what can I do to make sure that I don't end up actually losing traffic instead of gaining authority? Can you help me get the confidence I need to make this "move" without risking to lose tons of traffic? Thanks a big lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DuProprio.com0 -
Duplicate Content / 301 redirect Ariticle issue
Hello, We've got some articles floating around on our site nlpca(dot)com like this article: http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html that's is not linked to from anywhere else. The article exists how it's supposed to be here: http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ (our other website) Would it be safe in eyes of both google's algorithm (as much as you know) and with Panda to just 301 redirect from http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html to http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ or would no-indexing be better? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0 -
Duplicate Content from Article Directories
I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link: Google always give the response none. My client has a blog and many articles on the blog. However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content. Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none? Is there something to correct the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen0 -
Duplicate Content Through Sorting
I have a website that sells images. When you search you're given a page like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/ I also give users the option to resort results by date, views and rating like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/byrating/ I've seen in SEOmoz that Google might see these as duplicate content, but it's a feature I think is useful. How should I address this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andertoons0