Duplicate page content & titles on the same domain
-
Hey,
My website: http://www.electromarket.co.uk is running Magento Enterprise.
The issue I'm running into is that the URLs can be shortened and modified to display different things on the website itself. Here's a few examples.
Product Page URL: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/studio-bedroom-monitors/bba0051
OR I could remove everything in the URL and just have: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 and the link will work just as well.
Now my problem is, these two URL's load the same page title, same content, same everything, because essentially they are the very same web page.
But how do I tell Google that? Do I need to tell Google that? And would I benefit by using a redirect for the shorter URLs?
Thanks!
-
Hi Allen,
Thanks for that! Really helpful. I'll look into it right away.
Tom
-
404 errors are definitely not what you want.
You loose any link juice that may have been established for that URL. I believe you should look into a free plug-in available for Magento. It can be found with the search term "Canonical". It is easy to use, and is designed specifically for this issue.
Bing, Yahoo, Google, all follow the Canonical directive, and will solve the link juice issue automatically.
We use a different shopping cart, but have implemented the "Canonical" tag in a slightly different way, with the same result.
If you have multiple pages, each with the complaint from a search engine that they have duplicate content, then you should try and look at the page and think why does the search engine consider this duplicate content. Perhaps you have the same template being used for each of the paginated results. This page then is a great candidate to be "Canonicalized".
Canonicalization does not hurt you search engine rankings, think of it like a downtown metro area. Will your business stand out more if you have two small downtown locations, or will it draw more attention if it is a single building that is twice as tall? When you Canonicalize a url the link juice flows from the duplicate page to the single page specified in the Canonical url.
-
Oh okay, so yeah a lot of 404's! Ha.
The website currently has ~4100 products including product packages (2x 1 speaker etc.)
What I had in mind was using electromarket.co.uk/product code as a URL redirector or forwarder.
It will be a long process and it's going to take a lot of patience I imagine. But for now, having duplicate content (in theory) on the same website, is that going to cause problems with Google? Will Google see that it's the same URL and not take action or will I be penalized for it? That's my main concern at the moment!
Tom
-
No probs.
No, Magento URL Rewrite Module will not do the 301's for a mass change like going from category paths to just product paths - so you will be left with a lot of 404's to clear up. The other thing is that your individual product URL's, have no keywords in them whatsoever, except presumably the SKU's - so I think changing it may affect you adversely.
How many products do you have? 1200 hits a day is not bad going...
-
Hi Ben,
Thanks for that! I shall look into it. I'm a bit wary about turning the category URL off as I am currently getting around 1200 unique hits a day and wouldn't want to jeopardise that by sending potential customers to a 404 page (all be it a soft 404).
I know that if I change a URL to a product, magento set up a URL redirect from the old URL to the new URL. Is this an option with Magento for your URL change suggestion or would I just have to live with the 404's until my customers/previous visitors start to use the new URLs?
Thanks
-
Hi Thomas,
I'm familiar with Magento and familiar with SEO.
If you go to the magento admin panel, and go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine optimization, there is an option for:
Use Categories Path for Product URLs (which you have set to YES right now) and also this: Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products - which you may have set to yes o no. Enabling this last option tells Google that Product A is available under different URL's but it's the same page. This is how I had my setup. However, the rel canonical implementation is just a suggestion to search bots, not a directive, and from what I have read, when you have the same page appearing under 4 to 5 different categories, it is really down to Google and other bots to agree with you on the canonical.
So, I decided to set "Use Category Path for Product URL's" to NO - this means that your product will only be viewable under http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 which gets rid of duplicate content issues - you do lose the keyword rich URL's created by the category paths, but in the end I chose this option.
IMPORTANT: If you change that setting now, it will create a lot of 404's for you, as you probably have those indexed already in Google - this is a decision that in the short term creates a lot of work, but longer term I think solves a lot of problems.
Hope that helps,
Ben
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
I have one client with two domains, identical products to appear on both domains. How should I handle this?
Technical SEO | | Hazel_Key0 -
Duplicate content for vehicle inventory.
Hey all, In the automotive industry... When uploading vehicle inventory to a website I'm concerned with duplicate content issues. For example, 1 vehicle is uploaded to the main manufacturers website, then again to the actual dealerships website & then again to Craigslist & even sometimes to a group site. The information is all the same, description, notes, car details & images. What would you all recommend for alleviating duplicate content issues? Should I be using the rel canonical back to the manufacturers website? Once the vehicle is sold all pages disappear. Thanks so much for any advice.
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
Hi All, I am getting warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Does it really affect my site?. I am using wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0 -
Link Structure & Duplicate Content
I am struggling with how I should handle the link structure on my site. Right now most of my pages are like this: Home -> Department -> Service Groups -> Content Page For Example: Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> IT Support Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Managed Services Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Help Desk Services Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Virtualization Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Data Center Solutions This structure lines up with our business and makes logical sense but I am not sure how to handle the department and service group pages. Right now you can click them and it just brings you to a page with a small snippet for the links below. The real content is on the content pages. What I am worried about is that the snippets on those pages are just a paragraph or two of the content that's on the content page. Will this hurt me and get considered duplicate content? What is the best practice for dealing with this? Those department/service group pages have some good content on them but it's just parts of other pages. Am I okay doing this because there are not direct duplicates of other pages just parts of a few pages? Any help on this would be great. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ZiaTG0 -
How to prevent duplicate content in archives?
My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Duplicate Content Errors
Ok, old fat client developer new at SEO so I apologize if this is obvious. I have 4 errors in one of my campaigns. two are duplicate content and two are duplicate title. Here is the duplicate title error Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information.
http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/Default.aspx So, my question is... What do I need to do to make this right? They are the same page. in my page load for default.aspx I have this: this.Title = "Rare Currency And Old Paper Money Values and Information."; And it occurs only once...0 -
How do I fix Duplicate Content/Title going to memberlist.php page?
I have over 6,000 duplicate title and duplicate content errors going to this link: http://community.mautofied.com/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=100299 How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | mautofied0