Category descriptions and magento

[carl_daedricdigital]

Hi

Any eCommerce experts out there, please? I run a magento store and am looking to improve the performance of my category pages in the listings, to aid this I have created category descriptions - a hundred or so words about what, for example, a Maxi Dress is, an example can be seen here http:// yochic.co.uk/dress-267864/ maxi.html (I have broken the link as not sure on the linking policy of the forum).

I have noticed, however, that this category description is appearing all on sub pages of the section, so it is on page 1,2,3,4 etc. Is this likely to lead to me receiving a penalty for internal duplicate content?

The store uses rel="next" in all the category pages, so shouldn't that help limit any problems caused by the duplication of the page descriptions? I notice that when I search for a sub page, 2, 3, 4 etc in Google using the url of page two http://yochic.co.uk/dress-267864/maxi.html?p=2 it returns the first page, so am i right in thinking with the tags that Google sees all the sub pages as being page one.

In which case, doesn't that limit my ability to rank for the products listed on pages 2+?  Long story short, the site cannot rank it's product pages because the vast majority of the product descriptions are 100% duplicate because the site is an affiliate fashion store.

Many thanks

Carl

[Everett]

Hello Carl,

I tried to access those pages but didn't find anything on those URLs even after fixing them.

The rel next/prev is being used properly for the issue you're having.

I think the bigger issue is that you say all of your product descriptions are duplicates of any other site using the same affiliate feed. That is a big no-no and I don't think relying on category pages to rank for product searches is a good business plan. I hate to say it, but these types of sites really just don't do very well these days.

Nevertheless, your question was about the paginated URLs and I think the rel next/prev has you covered there. If you are more worried about it you can use a rel = canonical tag to ensure the first page in the series is seen as the canonical version.