Quick question on duplicate content

ideaburst

Hi guys,

A quick one - I have run an e-commerce website through some SEO software, and it is showing a tonne of warnings for duplicate content and title tags. The reason is that this is a large e-store and there are different ways of displaying the same content.

So, you can view a page as a 'category' page, a 'grid' page, or a 'list' page. This just means there are three different ways of viewing the same page, with the products displayed in different formats.

For example:

bluewidgets.com/blue-widgets/category-view
bluewidgets.com/blue-widets/grid-view
bluewidgets.com/blue-widets/list-view

As I said, the same range of products appear on each page, just arranged in a different order. There isn't much text on each page either, just the products and their titles.

Is it the case that we should add rel=canonical to one of the variants of each page, or is it that big a deal? Is there a quick way to do this? The site ranks very well anyway, and we have increased organic traffic massively over the past nine months.

Thanks

blue4ever

The google thing to do would be to do a d rel=canonical pointing back to your 'main' product page on pages with the same content

Pablo

Also remember that these are also distinct URLS
[noparse]
bluewidgets.com/blue-widgets/category-view/
www.bluewidgets.com/blue-widgets/category-view/
bluewidgets.com/blue-widgets/category-view/index.html
]www.bluewidgets.com/blue-widgets/category-view/index.html[/noparse]

Make sure you also redirect people to your preferred URL when they visit all of these 4.

So a rel=canonical is always good to have as pointed out above.

Alexoconnor

Have you set up a Google Webmaster Tools account for this website?

That's usually my first port of call before I even go near any SEO software.

I agree with the others that you need to utilise rel=canonical

From an SEO point of view you might reconsider the fact that "There isn't much text on each page either, just the products and their titles".

I know that you say that your site ranks well at the moment but every little bit helps :-)