Real impact of canonical links?

[DHS_SH]

I am responsible for 2 e-commerce websites.

SEO Moz and Google Web Master tools both inform me regularly that on both sites there are many instances of duplicate titles, headings, decriptions and page content. Obviously from an SEO point of view I am more than a little concerned about this!

Out product pages struggle to perform strongly despite the fact that our website is of a decent quality and we are leaders in our field. Our competitors rank above us when they add a product page, whereas we normal flit in between 8-10 or on the 2nd SERP.

I know it is hard without viewing the site, but is duplicate content likely to be a strong, leading factor in this?

I think it is, but want to put together a business case to spend the cash to sort it out....just need someone confirmation that this is worth sorting as a priority.

Here are 2 examples of what I mean:

1) Category pages

www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx

We have filters on our category page (so the customer can sort products based on their price, colour, size etc.). When filters are used a new URL is generared.

• www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=0||10
• www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=10||20

The content, titles, description is the same although the links are different.

Do I need to set up a canonical tag on the page that reads:

2) Product pages

Product pages on the websites have different URLs depending on how to arrive on them.

You get 1 URL if you navigated to the page via the website navigation, but you get another different URL if you used the website search functionality to find the page.

Example:

Search link:  www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1/Product1.aspx

Navigation link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/12345/category1/Product1.aspx

Again, do I need to set up a canonical tag for 1 of these link types so that the link benefit is not shared over 2 pages?

Any feedback would be welcome! At the moment the ability to add canonical tags is locked down by our CMS (I know, rubbish!)...so website development would be needed - hence the need for a business case!

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, you are 100% on the right track. You do need the canonical tags in place ASAP. Both on the category and the product level.

And yes, duplicate content is also a very important consideration, so I would definitely suggest creating a business case to get unique copy done for each of your pages.

Both of these points are high priority and I am sure that's why you posted the question...to confirm. You are right.

[DHS_SH]

Thanks for your feedback Nakul - glad I'm on the right track. The world of canonical links can certainly strain the old brain cells!

Don't suppose you have any other tips on how I can boost my product pages or any other things I should watch out for when employing canonical links across the entire site?

[Dr-Pete]

Especially post-Panda, duplicates can create a real mess. At best, it's a matter of dilution. The more pages in you have in Google's index that are "thin", the more thinly your internal link-juice (authority, basically) is spread. So, each page just gets less of it. In extreme cases, though, the entire site can suffer.

Canonicalization is tricky, and it's tough to be 100% sure from sample URLs, but my gut reacionts:

(1) Yes, I think you could safely use rel=canonical here. It's slightly odd, since these search pages are actually showing different lists of products, but your only real choices are rel=canonical or blocking the "prices=" parameter in Google Webmaster Tools. You could NOINDEX anything with "prices=" in it as well. I think canonical will work, though.

(2) This is definitely a case where you should use rel=canonical. There are true duplicates. Actually, the best case here is not to create these URLs, but I realize that's not always an option.

You could use GWT for #1, if development is an issue, but to solve (2) you're going to need some kind of page-level directive (like rel=canonical). There's no good way to get around the coding.

It's hard to gauge the impact, but I've definitely seen cases where the consequences of large scale duplicates were severe, and where large ranking/traffic improvements (as much as 3X, although it's not usually that dramatic) have occurred when the problem was fixed. To be aware that it's not instantaneous. It can take a few weeks to really see the impact.

[NakulGoyal]

Great points Dr Pete.