Self referencing canonicals AND duplicate URLs. Have I set them up correctly?

[Jacobsheehan]

Hi team,

We've recently redesigned our website.

Originally we had separate product listings for every product. Even if there was one design in two colours, each colour had its own listing.

With the redesign we merged all of these identical products to help with duplicate content. Customers can now browse the different stone colours available in that design from a single product listing (bottom left of screen under 'select a stone' on a product page)

When the customer changes the stone colour, the product images change to the new colour and its product code is appended to the end of the existing URL. eg:

http://www.mountainjade.co.nz/necklaces/assorted-jades-open-koru-necklace-jc1725/ (original listing)

http://www.mountainjade.co.nz/necklaces/assorted-jades-open-koru-necklace-jc1725/?sku=JC1725BL (black selected)

We have the following self referencing canonicals on all product pages [current-page:url:absolute], yet MOZ is telling me I have alot of duplicate content on pages with the above example.

Have I implemented the canonicals correctly? Is this why Moz is flagging the listings as duplicate?

[LoganRay]

Hi Jacob,

I took a look at your site, and the canonicals appear to be configured correctly. When you look at your duplicates in the Site Crawl report in Moz, and you click the + next to where it says "1 duplicate", what are you seeing? Is it a URL set like the example you've used above, or something else?

[Yoav-Blustein]

Jacob, as Logan wrote it looks like the canonicals are good to go.. (i just did a small sampling though..)
Not sure how your URLs are set but if the "sku=XXX" parameters are used only for color variations of a specific product, then you can use the URL paramater setting in Google Search Console.

This will make your life easier, and it will ensure that no duplicate content is crawled by Google. But URL parameters must be used with caution

good luck
Yossi

[Jacobsheehan]

Thanks so much for the reply Yossi.

Great tip about using GSC URL parameter tools. I'll definitely implement that.

Appreciate it.

Jake

[Jacobsheehan]

Hi Logan,

Thanks for looking into the canonicals for me. I'm glad to hear they appear to be configured correctly.

There are alot of duplicate page issues, with 109 in total at the moment.

Some are similar to the above example, some are URLS that contain refined search parameters (price, design etc), but most are just products which are almost identical. I think this is because most product pages have thin generic content, so for those examples we're in the process of writing unique product descriptions and adding unique imagery.

I've attached a few screenshot if you'd like to take a look.  Your thoughts would be much appreciated

JHN2H

[LoganRay]

As Yossi said, configuring parameters in Search Console should help - _but, _that's only going to help you out in Google.

Adding a disallow for those parameters in the robots file will help solve the problem in other search engines.

The thin content is definitely contributing as well. Moz identifies dupes based on a source code match between any two pages of 90% or higher. When you consider all your template code is the same across every page, thin content isn't enough to differentiate the source code.

I also noticed on one of those screenshots that you got a one dupe of /shop/necklaces/ and /shop/necklaces/necklace/. If you can, I recommend removing that second one with doubled up 'necklace' folders, that's going to cause a lot of dupes as well.

[Jacobsheehan]

Thanks for this Logan!

I really appreciate the help.

[Jacobsheehan]

One last question,

How exactly would I remove /shop/necklaces/necklace/?

Sorry if that's a stupid question. I just want to know a bit more before I take it to our dev.

Thanks.

[LoganRay]

If you've got that path anywhere in your navigation or other internal linking, you'd want to remove that or update it to /shop/necklaces/. The next step would be to 301 redirect /shop/necklaces/necklace/ to /shop/necklaces/ just in case you've got any links pointing to it - this will get your users where they want to go and also let search engines know you've relocated the page.