9 replies to this topic

[mungo2007]

Hi All

We have been having some issues with poor SERP's over the last few months (particularly at cateory level)and i have come accross an issue that must be causing a problem with duplicate content but i don't see how i can resolve it.

When doing a site: search on our domain name Google shows that there is around 19000 pages indexed, i know the site has approx 6000 pages. I have then dug a bit deeper by doing a site: search on our cateories this is displaying a worrying result saying that we have in most cases at least 3 and up to 211 pages indexed for different categories. Surely this is not right only 1 page should indexed.

After looking through the cached pages it is showing the main URL that i would expect to be indexed and then the others pages seem to have ?queries at the end ofr the URL with terms such as 'sort' 'page' 'currency'. This would indicate to me that google is duplicating the page if the customer is looking in a different currency, duplicating each individual page of the category (some categories have 12 pages of products)and duplicating if the customer is sorting the products by price or name.

At product level no problems only the 1 page is indexed so it is just affecting the cateories on the site.

Any ideas how i can resolve this issue and get Google to just index the main category page?

Any help would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks

Duncan

[FWR Media]

mungo2007, on 13 January 2011, 12:24, said:

Hi All

We have been having some issues with poor SERP's over the last few months (particularly at cateory level)and i have come accross an issue that must be causing a problem with duplicate content but i don't see how i can resolve it.

When doing a site: search on our domain name Google shows that there is around 19000 pages indexed, i know the site has approx 6000 pages. I have then dug a bit deeper by doing a site: search on our cateories this is displaying a worrying result saying that we have in most cases at least 3 and up to 211 pages indexed for different categories. Surely this is not right only 1 page should indexed.

After looking through the cached pages it is showing the main URL that i would expect to be indexed and then the others pages seem to have ?queries at the end ofr the URL with terms such as 'sort' 'page' 'currency'. This would indicate to me that google is duplicating the page if the customer is looking in a different currency, duplicating each individual page of the category (some categories have 12 pages of products)and duplicating if the customer is sorting the products by price or name.

At product level no problems only the 1 page is indexed so it is just affecting the cateories on the site.

Any ideas how i can resolve this issue and get Google to just index the main category page?

Any help would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks

Duncan

Canonical elements solve this issue, there are a number of contributions that achieve this, KissMT is one.

[mungo2007]

Ideal, thanks for such a quick response.

As i am not that technical and have someone else take care of this for me. Can i ask exactly what it will do, i have read the details but not totally sure what it means. Will it just make the search engine see 1 URL and strip out the extra data tagged on the end for page and sort etc.

Thanks

Duncan

[FWR Media]

mungo2007, on 13 January 2011, 16:45, said:

Ideal, thanks for such a quick response.

As i am not that technical and have someone else take care of this for me. Can i ask exactly what it will do, i have read the details but not totally sure what it means. Will it just make the search engine see 1 URL and strip out the extra data tagged on the end for page and sort etc.

Thanks

Duncan

It adds a canonical element to the head of your html.

This canonical element is supported by all of the major search engines, it informs the search engine of the preferred url for the current page .. e.g.

a URI may be www.mysite.com/my-great-category-c-32.html

Or if there is a language string ..

www.mysite.com/my-great-category-c-32.html?language=de

If the canonical is shown for both as just ..

www.mysite.com/my-great-category-c-32.html

Then there will be no duplicate content for the language string.

Handling this correctly can get a tiny bit complex e.g. KissMT handles pagination ( ?page=1&sort=2d ) buy showing a noindex follow robots meta tag.

[mungo2007]

That's great thanky you for the explanation, i see how it works now.

Thanks again for your help.

Duncan

[mungo2007]

I have spoken further with my developer about the Kissmt addon and he has told me that the addon conflicts with other addons already added to the site. Therefore he has attempted to resolve the problem with his own coding. Below is a snippit of the code added to one of the category pages this has been replicated through all category pages:

<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html dir="LTR" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Bollard Lights - Garden Lighting - Ace Lamps</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Buy superb bollard lights online now. A popular range our bollard lights are great as a security feature and for illuminating an area for entertaining. Garden Lighting - bollard lights Ace Lamps" />
<meta name="Keywords" content="Bollards, garden bollard, driveway bollard, interior lighting, exterior lighting, outdoor lights, indoor lights, light bulbs, lamps, ace lamps, des lamps, garden lighting, bathroom lighting, home lighting, modern lighting" />
<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<!-- EOF: Generated Meta Tags -->

<link rel="canonical" href="/garden-lighting-bollard-lights-c-956_1002.html?page=2&sort=2a" />


The code he has added is the bold code above taken from this page of the site http://www.deslamps.co.uk/garden-lighting-bollard-lights-c-956_1002.html?page=2&sort=2a we are a little unsure whether this will resolve the problem? And does the full URL need to be input?

Basically i just want one page indexed for each category and not have it duplicated for each page, sort, currency etc. as it is causing a major duplicate content issue resulting in very poor SERPS at category level

Can anyone advise?

Many thanks

[FWR Media]

mungo2007, on 27 January 2011, 13:04, said:

I have spoken further with my developer about the Kissmt addon and he has told me that the addon conflicts with other addons already added to the site. Therefore he has attempted to resolve the problem with his own coding. Below is a snippit of the code added to one of the category pages this has been replicated through all category pages:

<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html dir="LTR" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Bollard Lights - Garden Lighting - Ace Lamps</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Buy superb bollard lights online now. A popular range our bollard lights are great as a security feature and for illuminating an area for entertaining. Garden Lighting - bollard lights Ace Lamps" /> <meta name="Keywords" content="Bollards, garden bollard, driveway bollard, interior lighting, exterior lighting, outdoor lights, indoor lights, light bulbs, lamps, ace lamps, des lamps, garden lighting, bathroom lighting, home lighting, modern lighting" /> <meta name="robots" content="noodp" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <!-- EOF: Generated Meta Tags --> <link rel="canonical" href="/garden-lighting-bollard-lights-c-956_1002.html?page=2&sort=2a" /> The code he has added is the bold code above taken from this page of the site http://www.deslamps....?page=2&sort=2a we are a little unsure whether this will resolve the problem? And does the full URL need to be input?

Basically i just want one page indexed for each category and not have it duplicated for each page, sort, currency etc. as it is causing a major duplicate content issue resulting in very poor SERPS at category level

Can anyone advise?

Many thanks

If you are paying a developer then you should take it up with him .. his "solution" however is rubbish.

He has compounded the duplicate content.

[mungo2007]

Thanks for such a quick response.

Ok yes fair point and the amount i do pay him i am expecting a little more, my problem is i don't have the technical knowledge to know what is right and what is wrong so i have to go by what he tells me which i am begining to wonder whether he actually knows how to sort the problems we have with the site.

How does this compound the problem? Obviously i understand if there is information you prefer to keep as your intellectual property.

Many thanks

[FWR Media]

mungo2007, on 27 January 2011, 13:34, said:

Thanks for such a quick response.

Ok yes fair point and the amount i do pay him i am expecting a little more, my problem is i don't have the technical knowledge to know what is right and what is wrong so i have to go by what he tells me which i am begining to wonder whether he actually knows how to sort the problems we have with the site.

How does this compound the problem? Obviously i understand if there is information you prefer to keep as your intellectual property.

Many thanks

Take this URL

mysite.com/garden-lighting-bollard-lights-c-956_1002.html

Let's say that Google indexes this.

Then Google indexes

mysite.com/garden-lighting-bollard-lights-c-956_1002.html?page=2&sort=2a

The meta tags/data are the same, there is nothing to suggest to google that this is a totally separate page .. you therefore have duplicate content, 2 different urls pointing, as far as Google is concerned, to the same page.

There are two ways to handle this: -

1) Change the meta data/page titles etc so it is in fact a separate page ( maybe just add Page2 to the meta data )

or 2) issue a noindex, follow tag instructing the search engine to follow the links on the page but not to index it.

The use of a canonical element in this case is in my opinion incorrect as this would be to all intents and purposes a soft 301 redirect but we want the links to be followed.

[mungo2007]

Great response thank you, even with my limited knowledge i can see exactly what you are saying.