Magento and Duplicate content

[gregster1000]

I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento,

http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756

As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it?

Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering?

Thanks

[gfiorelli1]

Hi,

Magento is surely a "beast"... the way to solve your problem, as far as I understood it, is to use the rel="canonical", in order to show to the Search Engines what URL they have to consider in case of duplicated content.

The solutions?

1. or you have very good devs skills (or a developer very fond of Magento);
2. or you have to rely to the many extensions existing.

Very well know is the Yoast extension, but it seems it can give serious problem on the lastest version of Magento.

Another SEO extension is SEO Suite Pro Magento Extension (which exists also in a Ultimate version), Very good extension, but not for free.

[kwoolf]

Hi Gregster. I feel your pain. Having worked on Magento for the past three years, I've come across a lot of "issues" you'd expect a top-tier e-commerce solution provider to have under control.

I've written about getting canonical URLs in CMS pages here, something that many Magento SEO extensions don't do. I also had a custom SEO extension created and would be happy to share with you. No cost. Just use it.

I don't know if you have multiple languages, but that alone will create an exponential amount of duplicate content from dynamic parameters. Go into your WMT and set those parameters to be ignored. If you aren't sure how to do that, it's well documented here and on Google, Yahoo, and Bing webmaster sites.

I recommend you nofollow the login, search, and cart pages through XML layout. That will cross off another 500 pages or so.

One last mention is that RocketTheme has created a pretty neat extension that will get rid of the p parameter altogether by using JS to switch from grid and list views. Or you could just select in your admin to only allow either grid or list instead of both.

Any more questions just ask.

[gregster1000]

Hi Kevin,

I would be interested to talk more with you about this issue. What does your custom extension do that others don't?

Thanks again.

[GitaStreet]

"I recommend you nofollow the login, search, and cart pages through XML layout. That will cross off another 500 pages or so." Not nofollow. Don't use nofollow . This is for untrusted links - so should not be used for internal links.

It's Noindex.  And then use the canonical tag if 301 Redirects are not an option. To make life more complicated, you need to be careful not to do use noindex and canonical tag simultaneously.

[G2W]

Gregster,

I assume that you have found an answer to your question by now. However, I wanted to offer up what looks to be an extremely in depth and comprehensive walkthrough on Magento SEO from yoast.com. They have several sections on duplicate content, as well as a canonical plugin you may find useful.

http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/

Best of Luck!