Avoiding Duplicate Content - Same Product Under Different Categories

[Lepasti]

Hello, I am taking some past advise and cleaning up my content navigation to only show 7 tabs as opposed to the 14 currently showing at www.enchantingquotes.com.  I am creating a "Shop by Room" and "Shop by  Category" link, which is what my main competitors do.  My  concern is the duplicate content that will happen since the same item will appear in both categories.  Should I no follow the "Shop by Room" page?  I am confused as to when I should use a no follow as opposed to a canonical tag?  Thank you so much for any advise!

[GPainter]

Hello Cindy,

To stop the duplicate content use the rel=canonical tag it will then tell Google this is the original content and Google will then only index one of the tabs.

No follow is telling Google that you do not want to let "link juice" flow through that link and you're not really endoursing the link.

Rel=canonical is telling Google you have duplicate content but one of them is the original or the single on you want to be indexed.

Good luck.

[Lepasti]

Awesome - thank you SOOOO much, Chris!

[GPainter]

Welcome Cindy,

For more info on the tags you can find it here -

Rel=Canonical

No Follow

[Lepasti]

I really appreciate this help - one last question,  I am a bit confused about the link juice.  I thought I would not want to pass link juice to these duplicate pages, but instead it looks like it is okay because it shows I am endorsing the pages? Thank you

[GPainter]

There used to be a thought that you could horde all your link juice internally but in reality its not worth it. You could no follow the link to the duplicate page and hope that the majority of any links go to the correct page but if rel=canonical any link juice will go the correct place.

In short if you've set up rel=canonical make the rest of the site for users and the rest will come. Endorsing may not have been the best descriptive wording. Any questions let me know ill do my best to explain further. (you can also take a look at the "no follow" link above for more info.

[Lepasti]

Thank you so much for clearing this up for me.  You've been a huge help and I appreciate it so much.

[Lepasti]

I'm sorry to bother again...but do I need to add the canonical tag to each product or will just once to the main category page suffice? Thanks

[GPainter]

You need it in the head on each page that is a duplicate and pointing to the "original" page or the page you want indexed.

I'll just grab the same example from the help page -

Lets say you had some products that were the same -

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234567&sort=alpha&sessionid=5678asfasdfasfd
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234567&sort=price&sessionid=5678asfasdfasfd

We would put the following on the duplicate pages -

So in your case you may want to put it in your "shop by room" etc. category pointing towards "shop by category" (or visa versa)
this would then tell Google to only index one of the tabs (either room or category tab) and the other is a duplicate.

Hope that helps a bit. You can always take a look in the Google guide if you need a bit more help.

[Lepasti]

It helps tremendously.  Thank you so very much!