1st Campaign - Advice please.

[collar64]

We have just run our first campaign for our site and have found over 5,335 errors!

It would appear that the majority of which are where the crawl has duplicated the product page with the "write a review - Tell a friend page"...hence a large number of errors.

In addition we also have over 5,000 302 warnings for the following URL:

URL: http://www.collarandcuff.co.uk/index.php?_a=login&redir=/index.php?_a=viewCat&catId=105

Please bear in mind we are fairly new to this type of data....so go easy on us.

In short, will these errors have a significant bearing on our rankings etc and if so how do we rectify?

Many thanks.

Tony

[jsturgeon]

Hi Tony,

Welcome to the world of SEO

I just spoke to someone who had a similar issue (duplicates due to user reviews). There is a relatively clean solution for this and it comes with a fancy name, "Canonicalization". Here is a great step by step for setting a page to rel="canonical".

Basically, you want to tell Google that there is one "source" page for all the duplicates.

Example:

You have a page for blue widgets. Users can review the blue widget, but each new review becomes a new page (problem). If you label the original product page as canonical, your duplicates will be ignored, and the Google bot will be much happier with your site

It's hard for me to tell how much the duplicate content is impacting your ranking right now, but after you use rel=canonical, you should see some major improvements within a couple weeks.

As for the 302 redirects...you want to fix this immediately! Here is the step by step for 301's.

There are some shortcuts to changing 301 redirects depending on your platform...do you happen to know what your development team is using? Changing 5,000 of these would be a little cumbersome to do by hand

Keep up the good work!

[collar64]

Josh.

Thanks so much.

We use Cubecart v4...basic and i simple i know but it works for us.

Trust that helps.

Tony

[collar64]

Josh,

It appears that the errors may relate to the "Sign In" section of the page which for the record is available on every page of the site hence the number of errors. Would that have a bearing on the results and more importantly would that reduce the link juice?

[jsturgeon]

Hi Tony,

If the "Sign In" form is an element included on the page that you set to rel=canonical, the other instances of the sign in form should be neutralized (in terms of triggering duplicate content errors).

Usually, something as small as a sign in form doesn't constitute enough content to trigger the "duplicate" warning. The SE's algo has to account for certain elements that are useful on each page (for example, navigation bars). They are more concerned with people scraping large amounts of written content from other sites or just recycling large portions of their own site for SEO purposes.