Best practice to solve this Unique duplicate page content issue?
-
I just got Seomoz Pro (it's awesome!), and when I did a campaign for my website I discovered that I have a big issue with duplicate page content (as well as titles).
The Crawl Diagnostics Summary told me I have 196 Crawl Errors Found (I had a total of 362 pages crawled on my site), and as much as 160 of these was duplicate page content. Which to me sounds like a big problem, correct me if I'm wrong (I'm very new to SEO).
So our website is an ecommerce that sells greeting cards. The unique part about our platform is that we offer the customer to make a customization of the cards.
Let me walk you through each step a customer takes so you fully understand:-
They find a card they like and visit the product page of that card (just like on any ecommerce store.)
-
They then decide they want to buy it. There is no "Add to cart" button, they will instead click on a "customize the card" button.
3) This takes them to a step by step process of customizing the card. They change the name on the front of the greeting card so it says for example: "Happy Birthday Katy!". And then adds a personal text on the inside of the card.
- They then add an delivery address and when it should be delivered. After that they proceed to checkout and it's all done.
This is my website (it's in Swedish): loveday.se - it will take you to a product page so that you can click the green button and see what I mean with the customization pages. Hopefully it helps even though it's in Swedish.
My issue starts at the customization part of the site (the bolded step above), as I can see the permalinks in the diagnostics I got.
This step-by-step process looks exactly the same with every card in the store. Same call-to-action headline, same descriptive text etc. The only difference is a JPEG-file with the unique greeting card design.So, what is your take on this? Let me know if I was unclear about something.
Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.
-
-
Ahh, I see! Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it.
I also found from reading one of evovlingSEO's blog posts that with the help of checking my google webmasters account for any reports on duplicate content, I could see if Google had found any duplicate content.
There was no reports on this, so I guess it could be Roger crawling pages that Google don't? But I can see from viewing my source code that the code snippet you suggested me to add isn't there.
I will get back when I know if it's been solved or not for sure!
Thanks again.
-
I see what you mean. Here's what you do for these particular pages.
Since these have no real value as a search engine landing page (since they're basically all the same), Google won't want to send people to them. Seems reasonable, right?
But, because your site has a whole lot of these, Google may also decide that loveday.se as a whole is feeding them content that has a high % of non-useful pages. It's an indicator of an overall low-quality site. This really started to become an issue with the first "Panda" update. So, for each of these particular pages, you want to add a tag to your HEAD section:
| name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /> |
| We tell Google "noindex", because we don't want these pages in their index (really, they don't either, so everyone is happy). They're terrible landing pages for a search engine. |We tell Google to "follow", because the other pages that these are linking to are still of value. And we want Googlebot to continue crawling and crediting internal links on your site.
-
When looking at this link: http://www.loveday.se/personifering/1/utan-facebook
I get these sample URLs (It says it's a total of 50 duplicate URLs):
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/168/julkortshanghttp://www.loveday.se/personifering/145/far-motherfucker
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/123/prispokal
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/136/gravitation
http://www.loveday.se/personifering/63/fing-love-you
I'd say that out of all the 160 duplicate content pages, 99.9% of them have the same link path of http://www.loveday.se/personifiering/... Which is the customization page.
-
Could you provide a few samples of URL's that SEOmoz Pro claims contain duplicate content? It should show you if you click on the error, then click on individual links.
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
-
Duplicating words in the page title OK?
Im finding a site with lots of duplicated words in the title tags, I have always avoided doing this in the past, Is there any penalty for having a word repeated twice in the title, indeed is there a benefit from having it twice, IM assuming not
On-Page Optimization | | Donsimong
For example: Marketing Services in Milton Keynes | Our Services | TFA
https://www.t-f-a.co.uk/services the word service is repeated twice, in my opinion this is of no benefit at all and is better rewritten to remove the duplication1 -
To avoid the duplicate content issue I have created new urls for that specific site I am posting to and redirecting that url to the original on my site. Is this the right way to do it?
I am trying to avoid the duplicate content issue by creating new urls and redirecting them to the original url. Is this the proper way of going about it?
On-Page Optimization | | yagobi210 -
Duplicate URL errors when URL's are unique
Hi All, I'm running through MOZ analytics site crawl report and it is showing numerous duplicate URL errors, but the URLs appear to be unique. I see that the majority of the URL's are the same, but shouldn't the different brands make them unique to one another? http://www.sierratradingpost.com/clearance~1/clothing~d~5/tech-couture~b~33328/ http://www.sierratradingpost.com/clearance~1/clothing~d~5/zobha~b~3072/ Any ideas as to why these would be shown as duplicate URL errors?
On-Page Optimization | | STP_SEO0 -
Duplicate home page URL on crawl test
Hi i just recently made a crawl test but before doing that i made sure that i have no more duplicates on my site i am using joomla and as of now i only have 11 links on my site but when my crawl test is done i saw duplicate url of my homepage the duplicate url has a trailing backslash so basically i have all the 11 links + 1 duplicate URL http://mangthomas.com http://mangthomas.com/ can you guys give advise how i can remove the duplicate i dont even know which one to retain. THANKS A LOT, cris
On-Page Optimization | | crisbasma0 -
Is there a way to tell Google a site has duplicated content?
Hello, We are joining 4 of our sites, into 1 big portal, and the content from each site gonna be inside this portal and sold as a package. We don't wanna kill these sites we are joining at this moment, we just wanna import their content into the new site and in a few months we will be killing them. Is there a way to tell Google to not consider the content on these small sites, so the new site don't get penalised? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | darkmediagroup0 -
Duplicate page title - blogs
Hope someone can help me, I am a total SEO noivce so please be gentle. My first report shows that I have duplicate page titles. I have been through and changed all of these so they are different and after my latest crawl they are still showing as duplicates. I am wondering if this is because it;s a blog, here is one of the duplicates: http://www.cottagesoapcompany.co.uk/blog/?row=1 Hope you can help!
On-Page Optimization | | emmamoulden0 -
Different pages for OS's vs 1 Page with Dynamic Content (user agent), what's the right approach?
We are creating a new homepage and the product are at different stages of development for different OS's. The value prop/messaging/some target keywords will be different for the various OS's for that reason. Question is, for SEO reasons, is it better to separate them into different pages or use 1 page and flip different content in based on the user agent?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeLin0 -
Checking for content duplication against content on your own site.
We are currently trying to rewrite our product descriptions and I'm afraid some of the salespeople that are writing the descriptions are plagiarizing one-another's writing. Is there a content duplication checker that will allow you to check a piece of writing against a specific site rather than all of the web?
On-Page Optimization | | MichealGooden0