This Rookie needs help! Duplicate content pages dropped significantly.
-
So I am pretty new to SEO Moz. I have an e-commerce site and recently did a website redesign. However, not without several mistakes and issues. That said, when SEO Moz did a crawl of my site, the results showed A LOT of Duplicate Content Pages on my site due to my having one item in many variations. It was almost over whelming and because the number of pages was so high, I have been trying to research ways to correct it quickly. The latest crawl from yesterday shows a drastic drop in the number of duplicate content pages and a slight increase in pages with too long page titles (which is fixable). I am embarrassed to give the number of duplicate pages that were showing but, just know, it's been reduced to a third of the amount.
I am just wondering if I missed something and should I be happy or concerned? Has there been a change that could have caused this? Thanks for helping this rookie out!
-
OH BOY! You're going to have to let me read through this a time or two and get back to you! I think I get it but I need to digest a bit of this canonical stuff that I keep avoiding.
Thank you so much. I'll get back.
-
I would strongly consider using the rel=canonical tags on your pages. If you have 1 main product 20 variations in color and 3 different image prints as well then here is what I would do.
Find the most popular of the 20 variations in color and utilize the rel=canonical for the 19 other pages to point back to that most popular page. Dont worry about changing copy or anything drastically for this.
Now lets assume that the three different images are a disney print chair, a LOTR print chair and a Pixar Print Chair. You believe that people might actually be searching for these 3 products in a different way than your other 20. You should then try to create unique content for all 3 of these pages that differ from not only the other 20 color variations but also each of the other image print chairs. To make sure it is different I would not scrape any content from the other pages and re-purpose it but rather write 3 new descriptions and pages, Header Tags, Title Tags, Alt Tags, etc...
Now a best practice would still be to utilize a rel=canonical tag on all of your pages so that tracking parameters and the such do not end up getting linked to and you end up splitting your authority among different pages in the SERP. For a good source on rel=canonical I would look here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Hope this helps and isn't too confusing. -
No problem, good luck with your website
-
I do not need to necessarily rank for every fabric. There are a few such as Disney characters or sports teams that I do need to rank for. My previous site had all the chairs on one page with a drop down and it just was not as "simple" to shop the item and it made specific tracking and "book keeping" a little more difficult. I like to have zoomed and multiple views for each chair when possible. I find this reduces the number of returns and customer inquiries when the customer can really see each product.
So, giving each product it's own page is for two reasons - the customer's shopping experience and for my tracking purposes.
As for the meta tags- I think your quote above is possibly one issue. The programming on my site automatically generates the meta tag based upon my product description.
By the way, Thank you for your time and expertise.
-
Do you need to rank on every fabric name for your product ? If not, you could just put one product page and have the fabric choice in a dropdown menu.
And for the meta description, allow me to quote SEOmoz Beginners guide to SEO : "Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines)".
-
Thank you Aeronet. I think most of my issues are within the description. Example: I may have a kids recliner in 50 different fabric choices. So the url, title, meta tag, and product name are all unique. However, the description is practically the same for each chair. You have given me a couple things to look into though such as the written/unwritten url. New to me but I will look into it as well as double check some other things.
When my newly designed site was released, I was unaware that the new program would generate a URL for each page based upon my product ID and not the established URL that I assigned it. Therefore all of my previous, 5 yr old and hard worked, URL's vanished. I did not discover this for 25 days and had to do a 301 redirect on a large chunk of my site. It's been quite a mess.
The number of duplicate content pages have been overwhelming, but I was just shocked to see the number suddenly drop to a 3rd of what it was yesterday. Still not sure what has happened to cause this.
-
If you use only one item in many variations (and want to keep your website that way), you must find ways to make each page as unique as possible.
You should look at :
- The url.
- The title.
- The meta description.
- The product name and description.
- The product image name and alt attribute.
- The breadcrumb trail.
And try to customize them to make each product page unique.
Also check if a page is reachable with differents urls, if your product is reachable by its rewritten and non rewritten url, that could cause the duplicated pages problem on your website.
(For example, www.yourwebsite.com/product.php?id=02 and www.yourwebsite.com/shiny-rewritten-product-url)
If that's the case, use rel=canonical or 301 redirect to your rewritten URLs, make a sitemap with the latest ones and your duplicate pages number should go down.
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
-
On-page grader question
Hi there, Getting to know the Pro tools and can't find an answer to this. Can someone explain for me please? Using on page grader, I found a couple pages with an F. I scrolled downWTO where it shows the keyword phrases and under each, the URL. Clicking on the first keyword "Building site alarms"it tells me off essentially for not optimising the page for that term. The URL is "construction site security systems" which are different to building site alarms which also have their own page. I don't understand why is Moz associating this keyword with this page? I certainly haven't told it to. Please he
Moz Pro | | DaddySmurf0 -
Update in Moz spider/tools?? Flagging duplicate content / ignoring canonical
Hi all, Has there been an update in the SEOmoz crawling software? We now have thousands of dupe content/page title warnings for paginated product page URLs that have correctly formatted canonicals. e.g. http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx ... has following pages with identical content that have been flagged: http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=6 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 ..plus 4 more URL's. But they all have canonical set. There's even a notice at the bottom of report that tells us there's a canonical set to http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx What gives, SEOmoz ?? Thanks Michael
Moz Pro | | LawrenceNeal0 -
SEOMoz On-Page Report Card
This question is for one of the SEOMoz staff. With the ongoing changes and improvement in algorithms, does the SEOMoz team keep the "On-page Report Card" up to date with best practices?
Moz Pro | | tdawson090 -
On Page Grading Not Working
I am not getting any results in on page grading. When I click on add keywords a list of keywords appears that I have previously entered. They have tick boxes next to them and you can filter them but SEO moz is not automtically creating grade reports? Any ideas? Obviously I've set it up wrong somehow.
Moz Pro | | SamCUK0 -
On-Page Report Card B grade because its a PPC landing page
I have a PPC landing page with I'm getting a B grade on the On-Page Report Card. Can I just ignore that, it says its a "Critical Factor" Thanks Mike Crawl status <dd>Status Code: 200
Moz Pro | | mjrinvent
meta-robots: noindex,nofollowall
meta-refresh: None
X-Robots: None</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Pages that can't be crawled or indexed have no opportunity to rank in the results. Before tweaking keyword targeting or leveraging other optimization techniques, it's essential to make sure this page is accessible.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Ensure the URL returns the HTTP code 200 and is not blocked with robots.txt, meta robots or x-robots protocol (and does not meta refresh to another URL)</dd>0 -
On-Page SEO Fixes - Are They Relative?
So, I'm implementing on-page fixes for a site that my company runs SEO services for (www.ShadeTreePowersports.com). However, I was wondering if there was a way to rank a pages' SEO quality, in general? As of now, it seems like the only way your recommendations can be consumed and altered is on a keyword basis. However, this seems be the reason I have a good amount of my F-Grades. Since my website sells powersports apparel and accessories, we cover a variety of applicable (but different) keywords like 'Motorcycle parts' or 'snow tubes,' because we sell so many different types of products. But, when I look at my F-Grades - SEOMoz is telling me my homepage is ranking poorly for a multitude of those pertinent keywords - but only because my page isn't catered specifically to each of them (IE: 'Snowmobile Parts' - 'Water Sport Apparel') But, with so many different types of products, catering to a specific one is impossible and would be detrimental. Is there a way to see how a page ranks, without factoring in those keywords? Or a better way that I can use these recommendations more efficiently? Thanks guys!
Moz Pro | | BrandLabs0 -
How do I fix a duplicate content error with a top level domain?
Hi, I'm getting a duplicate content error from the SEOmoz crawler due to an issue with trailing slashes. It's showing www.milengo.com and www.milengo.com/ as having duplicate page titles. However I'm pretty sure this has been fixed in the .htaccess file since if you type in the domain with a trailing slash it automatically redirects to the domain without a trailing slash, so this shouldn't be an issue. I'm stuck here. Any ideas? Thanks. Rob
Moz Pro | | milengo0 -
On page links tool here at Seomoz
Hi Seomoz - first of all, thanks for the best SEO tools I have ever worked with (this is my first question in this forum, and also I just subscribed as a paying customer after the 30 days trial you guys offer). My question: After having worked for several weeks on getting the numbers of links in our forum on www.texaspoker.dk down, we are somewhat surprised to see that we didn't succeed in getting lower numbers. For instance, this page: http://www.texaspoker.dk/forum/aktuelle-konkurrencer/coaching-projekt-bliver-du-den-udvalgte has (that's what Seomoz seo tool tells us): 239 on page links. Can this really be true? We can't find these links, and we actuually did a lot to lower the numbers of links, for instance the forum members picture was a link before, and also there was a "go to top" link in each post in the forum. Thanks a lot.
Moz Pro | | MPO0