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
-
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 -
What would cause the wrong category page to come up?
I am trying to figure out why the wrong thing is coming up in the serps. For example, we are trying to rank for used widgets. But when you type in used widgets in google the primary widget page doesn't come up, one of the secondary categories under used widgets comes up. What would cause this? What are things I should check?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Woocommerce SEO & Duplicate content?
Hi Moz fellows, I'm new to Woocommerce and couldn't find help on Google about certain SEO-related things. All my past projects were simple 5 pages websites + a blog, so I would just no-index categories, tags and archives to eliminate duplicate content errors. But with Woocommerce Product categories and tags, I've noticed that many e-Commerce websites with a high domain authority actually rank for certain keywords just by having their category/tags indexed. For example keyword 'hippie clothes' = etsy.com/category/hippie-clothes (fictional example) The problem is that if I have 100 products and 10 categories & tags on my site it creates THOUSANDS of duplicate content errors, but If I 'non index' categories and tags they will never rank well once my domain authority rises... Anyone has experience/comments about this? I use SEO by Yoast plugin. Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre1 -
Why are these m. results showing as blocked?
If you go to http://bit.ly/173gdWK, you'll see that m. results are showing as blocked by robots.txt, but we don't have anything in our robots.txt file that specifies to block m. results. Any ideas why these URLs show as blocked?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Randomly Displayed Text: Hidden text issue?
I want to add some script to my site so that a given page publishes a different paragraph of text every time the page loads. Something like randomly displayed testimonials (but with more text). So, when you look at the page source, you would see all the text (e.g testimonial-1, testimonial-2, etc.), but the user would only see one paragraph randomly. Would this be considered hidden text (one code for search engine, one for use)? Is there a safe number of words you can do this with without setting off red flags? I appreciate the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
How to get a full blended listing
Hi people, After much hard work our site www.noyelling.com.au is doing very well in the SERPS in Brisbane. The only problem is that we've gone from having a full blended listing to what can be seen in the attached image - a map-pack listing. While we are number 1, I don't feel that having the listing as it is is offering anywhere near the value we'd receive from a full blended maps/organic listing. Any ideas on how a full listing can be achieved so that we can be number 1 and be separate from the map-pack we are part of currently? Thanks, Matt Williams www.noyelling.com.au 0t3I1Z2x3W3n3F08342R
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | duncan2740 -
Magento: URLs for Products in Multiple Categories
I am working in Magento to build out a large e-commerce site with several thousand products. It's a great platform, but I have run into the issue of what it does to URLs when you put a product into multiple categories. Basically, "a book" in two categories would make two URLs for one product: 1) /books/a-book 2) author-name/a-book So, I need to come up with a solution for this. It seems I have two options: Found this from a Magento SEO article: 'Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL's. Because Magento doesn't support this functionality very well - it creates duplicate content issues - it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "Use categories path for product URL's to "no".' This would solve the issues and be a quick fix, but I think it's a double edged sword, because then we lose the SEO value of our well named categories being in the URL. Use Canonical tags. To be fair, I'm not even sure this is possible. Even though it is creating different URLs and, thus, poses a risk of "duplicate content" being crawled, there really is only one page on the admin side. So, I can't go to all of the "duplicate" pages and put a canonical tag, because those duplicate pages don't really exist on the back-end. Does that make sense? After typing this out, it seems like the best thing to do probably will be to just turn off categories in the URL from the admin side. However, I'd still love any input from the community on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
How to deal with category browsing and duplicate content
On an ecommerce site there are typically a lot of pages that may appear to be duplications due to category browse results where the only difference may be the sorting by price or number of products per page. How best to deal with this? Add nofollow to the sorting links? Set canonical values that ignore these variables? Set cononical values that match the category home page? Is this even a possible problem with Panda or spiders in general?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0