Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect

[posthumus]

Hi,

i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop.

I'm grateful for any kind of help!

Thx,
boris

[DannyHoodless]

This happens with all ecommerce platforms.

This is usually due to the categories on your site duplicating your pages.

You may have one product that is available in different colours so two links are being created. For example  www.car.com/new-car

and

www.car.com/new-car=blue might be the exact same page.

Search engines are unsure which page to index from your website and they are very unlikely to show multiple or duplicate product pages within their index.

So, you need to inform search engines which page you wish for them to index.

The best way to solve these issues is to simply go through each error and solve it. You will start to notice a pattern in the duplicate content URLs and redirects. This should speed up the process. You could either add in canonical tags or simply use your robots file to block google crawling particular URL extensions. I have stopped bots from crawling my ecommerce pages that end with the parameter "route=product/search&tag" and "product-id" as these are non SEO friendly URLS that are duplicated versions of my pages.

Make sure that you also remove dead links and remove links that are going to versions of the page you don't want them too.

It's a lengthy process but it needs to be done.

Danny

[Daniel_Marks]

+1 to what Danny said. A couple other thoughts:

• +3000 4xx client errors: do any of these have many links or a significant amount of traffic? If not and they aren't a large portion of your overall site, it's not a big deal.
• **+3000 duplicate content issues: **as Danny said, there is likely a trend here, try to identify it and resolve it in mass rather than going page by page.
• **+35000 temporary redirects: **are any of these temporary redirects to important pages? If so, it's worth changing them to 301s. However, if they are all pointing to old, deep and weak pages then it's likely not a big concern again.

Daniel

[posthumus]

Hey guys,

thanks for your reactions. Appreciate it!

I guess it's time to roll up the sleaves...

cheers,

Boris