Duplicate page content & titles on the same domain

[tomhall90]

Hey,

My website: http://www.electromarket.co.uk is running Magento Enterprise.

The issue I'm running into is that the URLs can be shortened and modified to display different things on the website itself. Here's a few examples.

Product Page URL: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/studio-bedroom-monitors/bba0051

OR I could remove everything in the URL and just have: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 and the link will work just as well.

Now my problem is, these two URL's load the same page title, same content, same everything, because essentially they are the very same web page.

But how do I tell Google that? Do I need to tell Google that? And would I benefit by using a redirect for the shorter URLs?

Thanks!

[bjs2010]

Hi Thomas,

I'm familiar with Magento and familiar with SEO.

If you go to the magento admin panel, and go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine optimization, there is an option for:

Use Categories Path for Product URLs (which you have set to YES right now) and also this: Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products - which you may have set to yes o no. Enabling this last option tells Google that Product A is available under different URL's but it's the same page. This is how I had my setup. However, the rel canonical implementation is just a suggestion to search bots, not a directive, and from what I have read, when you have the same page appearing under 4 to 5 different categories, it is really down to Google and other bots to agree with you on the canonical.

So, I decided to set "Use Category Path for Product URL's" to NO - this means that your product will only be viewable under http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 which gets rid of duplicate content issues - you do lose the keyword rich URL's created by the category paths, but in the end I chose this option.

IMPORTANT: If you change that setting now, it will create a lot of 404's for you, as you probably have those indexed already in Google - this is a decision that in the short term creates a lot of work, but longer term I think solves a lot of problems.

Hope that helps,

Ben

[tomhall90]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for that! I shall look into it. I'm a bit wary about turning the category URL off as I am currently getting around 1200 unique hits a day and wouldn't want to jeopardise that by sending potential customers to a 404 page (all be it a soft 404).

I know that if I change a URL to a product, magento set up a URL redirect from the old URL to the new URL. Is this an option with Magento for your URL change suggestion or would I just have to live with the 404's until my customers/previous visitors start to use the new URLs?

Thanks

[bjs2010]

No probs.

No, Magento URL Rewrite Module will not do the 301's for a mass change like going from category paths to just product paths - so you will be left with a lot of 404's to clear up. The other thing is that your individual product URL's, have no keywords in them whatsoever, except presumably the SKU's - so I think changing it may affect you adversely.

How many products do you have? 1200 hits a day is not bad going...

[tomhall90]

Oh okay, so yeah a lot of 404's! Ha.

The website currently has ~4100 products including product packages (2x 1 speaker etc.)

What I had in mind was using electromarket.co.uk/product code as a URL redirector or forwarder.

It will be a long process and it's going to take a lot of patience I imagine. But for now, having duplicate content (in theory) on the same website, is that going to cause problems with Google? Will Google see that it's the same URL and not take action or will I be penalized for it? That's my main concern at the moment!

Tom

[Davenport-Tractor]

404 errors are definitely not what you want.

You loose any link juice that may have been established for that URL. I believe you should look into a free plug-in available for Magento. It can be found with the search term "Canonical". It is easy to use, and is designed specifically for this issue.

Bing, Yahoo, Google, all follow the Canonical directive, and will solve the link juice issue automatically.

We use a different shopping cart, but have implemented the "Canonical" tag in a slightly different way, with the same result.

If you have multiple pages, each with the complaint from a search engine that they have duplicate content, then you should try and look at the page and think why does the search engine consider this duplicate content. Perhaps you have the same template being used for each of the paginated results. This page then is a great candidate to be "Canonicalized".

Canonicalization does not hurt you search engine rankings, think of it like a downtown metro area. Will your business stand out more if you have two small downtown locations, or will it draw more attention if it is a single building that is twice as tall? When you Canonicalize a url the link juice flows from the duplicate page to the single page specified in the Canonical url.

[tomhall90]

Hi Allen,

Thanks for that! Really helpful. I'll look into it right away.

Tom