Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
-
Hello,
We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content.
What we have done so far:
- Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product")
- Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL)
In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do?
Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change)
Thank you in advance
-
Thank you for your answer. I would love to do it this way, unfortunately our current system wouldn't allow it. With more than 5000 products on our website, different content for each color variation would be time consuming.
My question was about "noindex,follow" on children products (with the proper canonicalisation) and its SEO impact. But my guess is that canonicalisation should be enough to address the issue.
-
Hello,
If color is the main variation in the products, can you just set those as options, so each color is not a separate page? Then you just have one item and the user just selects a different color from that page. That is really the way this should be done to avoid any duplicate content issues. The other idea would just be to write different content for the pages, which if they are different products, they should already have different content already.
Hope that helps.
-
Thank you for your answer. Great job on this guide! Actually, we already did this on our product listing pages (a combination of next/prev, noindex/follow and canonicals). It worked great.
However, our current issue is about our product pages. I'm wondering if a combination of canonicalisation and noindex on secondary content would be relevant.
-
Hi there,
You may have a more complex pagination issue. My former colleague wrote a good guide to this sort of e-commerce pagination / canonicalisation problem a few months ago. It may qualify as one of the non-boring reads on the subject
Do you see a solution here that looks good for you? - http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html
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
-
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
Disallow: /jobs/? is this stopping the SERPs from indexing job posts
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesHancocks1
I was wondering what this would be used for as it's in the Robots.exe of a recruitment agency website that posts jobs. Should it be removed? Disallow: /jobs/?
Disallow: /jobs/page/*/ Thanks in advance.
James0 -
Redirect wordpress from /%post_id%/%postname%/ to /blog/%postname%/
Hi what is the code to redirect wordpress blog from site.com/%post_id%/%postname%/ to site.com/blog/%postname%/ We are moving the site to a new server and new url structure. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Paragraphs/Tables for Content & SEO
Hi Does anyone know if Google prefers paragraphs over content in a table, or doesn't it make much difference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate Content From Indexing of non- File Extension Page
Google somehow has indexed a page of mine without the .html extension. so they indexed www.samplepage.com/page, so I am showing duplicate content because Google also see's www.samplepage.com/page.html How can I force google or bing or whoever to only index and see the page including the .html extension? I know people are saying not to use the file extension on pages, but I want to, so please anybody...HELP!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebbyNabler0 -
News sites & Duplicate content
Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
Chris Captivate0 -
Does rel=canonical fix duplicate page titles?
I implemented rel=canonical on our pages which helped a lot, but my latest Moz crawl is still showing lots of duplicate page titles (2,000+). There are other ways to get to this page (depending on what feature you clicked, it will have a different URL) but will have the same page title. Does having rel=canonical in place fix the duplicate page title problem, or do I need to change something else? I was under the impression that the canonical tag would address this by telling the crawler which URL was the URL and the crawler would only use that one for the page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | askotzko0 -
Capitals in url creates duplicate content?
Hey Guys, I had a quick look around however I couldn't find a specific answer to this. Currently, the SEOmoz tools come back and show a heap of duplicate content on my site. And there's a fair bit of it. However, a heap of those errors are relating to random capitals in the urls. for example. "www.website.com.au/Home/information/Stuff" is being treated as duplicate content of "www.website.com.au/home/information/stuff" (Note the difference in capitals). Anyone have any recommendations as to how to fix this server side(keeping in mind it's not practical or possible to fix all of these links) or to tell Google to ignore the capitalisation? Any help is greatly appreciated. LM.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlS0