SEOmoz indicating duplicate page content on one of my campaigns

[ckilgore]

Hello All,

Alright, according to SEOmoz's PRO campaign manager, one of my websites is returning about 2,700 pages that supposedly have duplicate content. I checked a few of them manually and am not seeing where the issue lies. Is anyone else experiencing something similar to this and do you know if it is just a glitch with the crawl?

Here are 2 of the pages it is indicating have dup page content:

1. http://www.dieselpowerproducts.com/c-3120-1994-98-59l-12v-dodge-cummins-carbon-fiber-hoods.aspx
2. http://www.dieselpowerproducts.com/c-90-dodge-cummins-94-02-59l-12v24v.aspx

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

-Craig

[ChrisDyson]

Hit CTRL + U and now compare the 2 pages you can see that this page has just 3 products on it this means that about 90% of the content on this page i.e. the header, sidebar, footer is the same as this page.

1. Your titles are also very similar one is 1994-02 5.9L Dodge Cummins Diesel Performance Parts and the other is 1994-98 5.9L Dodge Cummins Carbon Fibre Hoods make sure your titles lead with the difference i.e.

Carbon Fibre Hoods for 1994-98 5.9L Dodge Cummins

2. Canonise your Product Pages - make sure you use the rel="canonical" on the individual product listings

3. Remove the common text - e.g. opening hours from the sidebar and consider a page specifically for that content

4. Try adding a unique paragraph to each page - this is easier said than done depending on your CMS but every little helps

[ckilgore]

Thanks Chris, wasn't sure how big of an effect the sidebar, header, footer, etc. would have on this which is why I dismissed it right off the bat. I have been running this campaign in SEOmoz for quite some time now and there have been no major changes to the static or product pages and all of a sudden it just spiked last month to show me all of the dup content errors.

Regarding the rel="canonical", would I really want to do that on product pages if most of them are providing unique content about the individual product or are you referring to implementing it on this page pointing to this page?

I can see where the unique paragraph would help and hopefully eliminate the issue if it in fact lies with the header, footer, sidebar on those pages with just a few products and no descriptions or content.

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

[ChrisDyson]

You  want to rel="canonical" the actual products in the categories for example with Magento with just 5 products in a category page you can end up with nearly 200 different URLs because

• You can sort them by Grid or by list
• You can sort them by Position, Name, Price etc
• You can show 9, 15 or 30 per page
• You can sort them ascending or descending

So basically any link that changes the visual elements of a page but doesn’t change the content of the page I'm not sure if your site does this but that's why its important to use rel="canonical" for eComm sites..

[ckilgore]

makes sense, thanks again for your replies and for taking the time, much appreciated!