Duplicate Content & ECom

8/4/2019 Duplicate Content & ECom

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Is your E-commerceSystem Harming Your

Search Engine Rankings

www.altruik.com

Hamlet BatistaChie Search [email protected]


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Copyright 2011 Altruik, Inc.

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Table o Contents

What Is Duplicate Content? 3

How Duplicate Content Aects Your

Search Engine Rankings 5

How To Put An End To Duplicate Content

So You Can Reclaim Your Ranking 8

When Duplicate Content Is Not Really

Duplicate At All 11

Sound Like Too Much Manual Labor? 12

Will You Prot From Addressing Duplicate

Content Issues? 13

Heres What You Should Do Next 14

As an online retailer, your search engine

strategy isyour business strategy. Have

you noticed your search engine rankingsslipping away recently? Do you wonder what

the cause might be? It is critical that every

page selling your products ranks as highly as

possible in search engines like Google. Thats

why it is important that you optimize your site

or search engine spiders, especially i you are

using a CMS (content management system).

There is a hidden dangeran issue that aects

the majority o e-commerce websiteswhichmost business owners dont know about it

until it is too late. That problem is duplicate

content.

I you have multiple copies o the same page,

dierent URLs that point to the same content,

and navigation systems that track your users,

there is a good chance that you have an issue

with duplicate content, too.

Most Content Management Systems, as use-

ul as they are, surprisingly are not designed

with SEO in mind. Your CMS eatures tools

that make nding products easier or visitors

to your website. But those same eatures that

duplicate product pages into multiple catego-

ries oten make it dicult or Google to crawl,

index, and rank all o the pages on your site.


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Duplicate content causes serious problems

because it:

Weakens the rank o your most popular

pages

Sends Google on a wild goose chase, caus-

ing it to abandon your site altogether

Blocks large portions o your website rom

getting indexed

Prevents your most protable pages rom

reaching the top o Googles rankings

Cripples your best link-building eorts

Duplicate content problems are like leaky au-

cets. As more sites link to your duplicate URLs,

the reputation and rank o your top-selling prod-

uct pages go down the drain. Products that once

ranked very high suddenly begin tumbling down

the rankings, and your competition gains the

upper hand. The question now is: how can you

identiy duplicate content and patch up the leaks

that are ruining your search engine rankings?

Keep on reading because were going to teach

you what most people dont know about the

mess their CMS is leaving behind. Your priority

is to patch these leaks beore they drown yourentire online business. With the right tools, you

can build an even stronger search presence.

I you have a duplicate content problem,

huge portions o your website might not be in Googles index.


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What Is DuplicateContent?

First, the basics. Duplicate content

is any page on the Internet that is

either exactly the same or nearly

identical to another page. Google

compares the text o multiple pages

to determine a match. I the writ-

ten content is exactly the same, or

almost exactly the same, Google

considers the newer page to be du-plicate content.

Most duplicate content is created

when your CMS allows visitors

(and Google) to access the same

page rom dierent URLs. Lets say

your online store has a category or

shoes and another category or all

products in the color black. The

same pair o black shoes can be ac-

cessed rom two dierent category

combinations, one in which the user

selects shoes rst, and another in

which the user chooses black rst.

These pages are almost identical. The URLs are dierent

but lead you to the same product, Jessica Simpson Womens

Leve Black Leather shoe. In each example, users selectedvarious categories in dierent orders and were able to ac-

cess the same content via dierent paths.


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Googles search engine robot crawls your web-

site like a nosy visitor, ollowing each link or

every category. It will nd the same page twice,

once under one combination o categories,

and another under the other. You dont actu-

ally have two copies o the same page, but your

CMS setup certainly makes it look like you do.

Duplicate content is also created when:

You use multiple subdomains. Google thinks

you have duplicate content when you put

the same page on http://example.com as

you do on http://www.example.com. That

www. makes a big dierence to Google.

Your CMS creates separate pages or di-

erent product colors. Google cant tell the

dierence between an image o a blue shoe

and a red shoe (it relies on textual descrip-

tions). It will conclude that one o these

pages is a duplicate.Your CMS dynamically

generates pages as your users click on links.A good example o this is a calendar that

creates a new page every time you click on

the next month link.

You, or people linking to your pages, add

extra parameters to URLs (sometimes or

tracking), creating multiple URLs that direct

Google to the same page over and over

again.

As you can see, duplicate content can arise rom

a variety o sources. Each o these is another

leak in your aucet. It creates a number o nasty

problems, both or Googles search engine robot

and or other search engines. Sometimes it

sends the robot on an endless chase that Google

eventually abandons, and at other times, it

simply dilutes the reputation o all your aected

pages. When only a small portion o your site

makes it into the search engine rankings, your

overall ranking suers.

Page reputation is diluted with the same con-

tent is accessible through multiple URLs. You

can recapture reputation and prevent duplicate

content by consolidating non-canonical versions

with 301 redirects. Source: Googles SEO Report

CardGoogle Webmaster Central

In the next section, well show you how dupli-cate content prevents your most protable pages

rom making it to the top o Googles rankings.

Glossary

301 Redirect An HTTP status code. Automatically redirects users to a specic URL

200 A successul request, content is returned


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How Duplicate Content Aects Your Search EngineRankings

Now were ready to see how duplicate content aects Googles impression o your content, wreak-

ing havoc on your search rankings in the process.

How duplicate content

dilutes the ranking o your

top-rated pages

Lets say you just wrote a

popular article that wentviral. Would you rather see

the entire article getting a

million views, or would your

preer to split the article

in two and assign 500,000

views to each section? I you

chose the ormer option,

youre on the right track.

As a single page receives

more views, it increases thechances o receiving natural

links. More people share the

page, blog about it, and link

to it.

You want your website listed in the prime real estate o the results

page. Splitting links will dilute rankings o your strongest pages.


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When you have multiple versions o the same

article, video, or page, Google splits your repu-

tation between all o the pages. Your duplicate

pages siphon o a large portion o your inbound

links, and it takes longer or your article, video,

or page to rank highly in Google. No matter

how many links you get, some o them are go-

ing down the drain.

How duplicate content cripples your best

link building eforts

Consider another example. A Doggy Care

website using a CMS creates two URLs or dog

bone under the category ood and another

under the category treats. To a search engine,

the result is once again duplicate content.

Thats only the hal o it. What happens when

customers really like the dog bone and want

to tell others about it? They link to it on their

website. However, because there are two dier-

ent pages created by the CMS or the same dogbone, they might link to either one o them.

A product that would have received 100 links

only receives hal that. The rest leak over to the

duplicate page.

When youre trying to rank highly in Google,

you must avoid wasting your links and repu-

tation on duplicate pages. I these duplicates

make it into Googles index, they will almost

certainly be ltered out o the rankings. 100% o

your inbound links should go to the same page.

In Googles eyes, that gives you 100% o the

reputation.

How duplicate content sends Google on a

wild goose chase

Another problem to consider can be even more

tragic or your search rankings. What might

happen i Google decides that your website is

composed mostly o duplicate content? The

short answer is that it will stop indexing your

pages and move on to other websites. Here is

what Matt Cutts, head o Googles Webspam

team, has to say about duplicate content:

Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and

then we discover that the two other pages were

duplicates of the third page. Well drop two out of

the three pages and keep only one, and thats why

it looks like it has less good content. So we might

tend to not crawl quite as much from that site

[T]he fact that you had duplicate content and

we discarded those pages meant you missed

an opportunity to have other pages with good,

unique quality content show up in the index.

There are a number o scenarios in which

Googles robot will give up crawling your web-

site, leaving vast numbers o pages completely

out o the index and your site fagged as mostly

spam. Here are some o the most common

caused by your CMS:


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Your CMS creates a calendar that generates

a new page or a new month every time you

click on the next month link. Because your

website keeps generating a new link every

time Googlebot ollows the next month

link, Googlebot keeps ollowing this link as

long as it can and eventually times out.

Your website eatures a guided navigation

shopping cart with categories or dierent

brands and types o products. Because the

products and categories are linked to each

other (oten in very complex ways), Google-bot keeps ollowing the links in circles until it

times out.

Your website uses a session ID in its URLs

to track users who have cookies disabled

(jsessionid is a common example o an

in-URL session ID that gets indexed as du-

plicate content). I these IDs are present in

the path_ino portion o your URL, they are

particularly dangerous.

This last one can be particularly nasty. When a

search engine bot crawls the site, it acts like a

user with browser cookies disabled. Each time

Googlebot requests a page, it is given a new page

with a new jsessionid. This quickly causes the

bot to see millions o pages that are identical,

diering only in the URLan innite space that

Googlebot treats as duplicate content.

Once Googlebot understands that is going in

circles (or down an endless drain like the calen-

dar example), it concludes that your site is com-

posed mostly o duplicate content and stops

crawling your website. This is a very bad thing,and it can cause large portions o your site to go

unnoticed. You can make vast improvements in

your search engine rankings by tackling just this

problem alone.

Now that you understand how duplicate con-

tent can harm your search engine rankings,

we want to show you what you can do to stop

your CMS rom creating so much o it. Youll be

happy to know that all o these problems can be

solved, and you can use automated tools to help

you handle most o them.

Source: Google's SEO Report CardGoogle Webmaster Central


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How To Put An End To Duplicate Content So You CanReclaim Your Ranking

As you have already seen, duplicate content problems happen all on their own. I you dont do

something to address them beore they aect your ranking, your competitors will gain the edge.

There are solutions to duplicate content problems and well take a look at the how to solve the

most dangerous ones.

Is Your Content Accessible From Multiple

Subdomains?

As we discussed earlier, when your website

is accessible rom multiple subdomains (or

example, both example.com and www.ex-

ample.com), Google treats the content on one

o the subdomains as a duplicate. It can also

happen when your CMS uses multiple URLs to

point to the same content. I Google ollows

the link http://

www.dogtoys.com/

chewybone.php

and http://www.dogtoys.com/bones/

chewybone.php

to the same page,

Google will index a

duplicate page or

one o the URLs.

But the x is rela-

tively easy. You just

need to tell Google

which subdomain contains the original source

material. There are two ways to do this:

1. Implement 301 redirects to send people to the

right subdomain with the original content.

2. Or use the Googles Webmaster Tools to

choose which domain contains the original

content. This process is sometimes called

canonicalization.

When this page is selected in the search engine results page, us-

ers are automatically directed to the canonical URL.


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Once you have indicated to Google where it can

fnd the original content, it will no longer index

your subdomain. Because your primary (canoni-

cal) page will be the only page that can get links

and reputation, it will start perorming much

better in the search engine rankings. Congratu-

lations: youve just fxed one o the leaks in your

aucet.

Are some pages near duplicates o others?

What to do when your product descriptions

only difer by ew words.

This problem usually aects online retailers

who sell many dierent versions o the same

product. Perhaps you sell a golden chocolate

basket, a silver chocolate basket, and a bronze

chocolate basket. I the only dierence between

one product description and the next is the

color or the image, you need to indicate this to

Google so that it does not conclude that you

have duplicate content.

You can do this by using the rel=canonical

link tag on the pages with the near-identical

content. Make sure you place this tag some-

where in section o these near-duplicate

pages, just as you would with meta tags. Heres

an example.

Whenever you use this tag, you are telling

Google that the current page is either a dupli-cate or a near-duplicate, and the original page

can be ound at the address you have specied.

Do your URLs contain extra parameters or

tracking and sorting? They might accidentally

convince Google that you have a duplicate

content problem.

Some shopping carts add parameters to your URLs or the purposes o sorting, dividing products into

pages by category, and tracking users. Googles search engine robot unwittingly ollows all o these

URLs, and it keeps fnding more duplicate content. I you dont tell Google which parameters to ignore,

Googlebot will keep spinning its proverbial wheels. Heres what you can do:


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How to stop Google rom going on a wild

goose chase.

Sometimes Google nds large sections o your

website that contain links to pages with no

original content. This is called the innite

space problem because Googlebot gets stuck

in these sections, continually crawling the

same series o dynamically generated pages or

URLs with session IDs and tracking parameters,

over and over again. As we discussed, oten the

culprit is the jsessionid parameter. Thankully,

there is a way to stop it.

Google knows about the innite space prob-

lem, and will tell you i your website has this

issue when you log in to Google Webmaster

Tools. Specically, it will list which links lead

to an innite space, and oers a ew tips topatch things up.

Once youve ound the links that lead to an

infnite space, do one o the ollowing:

Set the rel attribute in the suspicious link

to noollow. When you do this, your new

link should look like the ollowing:

< a hre=http://www.calendar.com/nextmonth.php

rel=noollow>next month

Block the innite space URLs in your robots.

txt le.

Make it impossible or search engines to ex-

tract these URLs. You can do this by hiding

them within JavaScript.

Now that you have the tools to clean up dupli-

cate content, in the next section well consider

a ew important cases where duplicate content

is not only acceptable, but necessary.

Google Web-

master Tools

allows users to

defne what pa-

rameters Google

should ignore

when crawling

a website.


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Sometimes you end up with exact duplicatepages or legitimate reasons. This is no crime,

o course, but it does require you to let Google

know so that your site may be indexed appropri-

ately by the search engine robot. It also pre-

vents your website rom being fagged as mostly

duplicate content. Heres the x:

Use a 301 redirect i you have duplicatepages that just cant be avoided.

Using a 301 redirect not only sends your users

to the canonical page, it also tells Google that

the page is an exact or near duplicate. Google

continues to crawl your site because you are no

longer using up its bandwidth unnecessarily.

There are also two minor cases worth under-

standing where duplicate content can actually

help your rankings. Keep in mind, these are very

specic and do not apply to every website.

You dont have to worry about localizedcontent on international domains.

What happens when you host the same content

on dierent regional servers and international

domains? For example, suppose you copy the

same content on http://www.example.com to

your local servers at http://www.example.r.

Will the content make it into the search engineresults page abroad, or will also be deemed du-

plicate content?

In this case, there is nothing to worry about.When hosted on dierent international do-

mains, search engines like Google do not con-

sider the same content as duplicate content.

That said, the issues concerning subdomains

that we discussed previously also apply to your

international websites. That means you will

have to go through the time-consuming task o

canonicalizing your URLs so that they all point

to the same international pages, just like you

did on your home website domain.

Sometimes you dont need to consolidate your

duplicate pages. Heres how to know when...

As youve learned, in most cases it is benecial

or a single page to garner the highest possible

rank. Ater all, i this page eatures one o your

bestselling products, you are practically guaran-

teed more sales. But there is one case when us-ing canonical tags and giving all o your reputa-

tion to a single page isnt the best idea.

When your visitors really care about your

products attributes (e.g. the products color),

it might be smart to separate your pages. Lets

return to the example about shoes. I your

online store oers the same shoe in multiple

colors, and you have ound that customers are

specically searching or products in the colorturquoise, you might benet rom treating

each color o the product as a separate page.

When Duplicate Content Is Not Really Duplicate At All


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Both your shoes and your turquoise pages

will get trac rom color-based searches. Your

competitors are probably doing the same thing.

Whenever you separate your pages, you need

to make them stand on their own. Your product

page or the turquoise shoes must be distinct

enough rom the page or the black shoes to

pass Googles duplicate content lter. Otherwise,

Google will not rank the page at all. It is not

enough to swap out a ew words and reorganize

paragraphs to create a new description. Google

is too smart or that. Youll need to rewrite eachnew product description rom scratch.

Once again, it bears repeating that this is an ex-

ceptional case. You must really understand your

customers, and more importantly, pay attention

to their search behavior.

I your customers are not typically searching

or dierent variations o the same product, it

is sae to use canonical tags and consolidate

duplicate content. But i they usually search

or items by their color, size, weight, etc., you

should keep the pages separate and write new

descriptions to individualize the content.

It doesnt matter i you own one website or

many websites on several international do-

mains. By now, you have the knowledge to

understand and tackle the problem o duplicate

content. However, you have probably realized

just how time-consuming the process o consol-

idating your content can be. Do you really want

to go through every duplicate or near-duplicate

page, every subdomain, and every extra param-

eter in your URLs?

You are a businessperson, so like us your an-

swer will be an armative NO! You have better

ways o spending your valuable time. Luckily

or you, we developed our Lighthouse sotware

originally to solve our own duplicate content

problems. We were slaving away, consolidating

content or one o our clients, and we sim-

ply grew tired o the whole process. You can

manually implement only so many 301 redirects

beore you start thinking, There has to be a

better way.

Lighthouse does everything weve discussed so

ar, and it does a ew more things beyond the

scope o this paper. Here is a quick rundown:

Sound Like Too Much Manual Labor? Theres Good News.Most O It Can Be Automated.


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Automated 301 redirects and

rel=canonical tags. Lighthouse spots your

duplicate pages and automatically imple-

ments 301 redirects and rel=canonical tags.

Automated robots.txt analysis. Lighthouse

nds and corrects problems with sitemap

accessibility, innite spaces, and crawl

delays.

We understand how all o this can seem like

a huge project at rst. Thats why wed like to

show you a way to measure the direct business

benet youll get rom tackling each o these

issues head on. In the next section, youll learn

what you need to know beore you decide to

launch an all-out assault on your websites du-

plicate content.

Its one thing to suspect you have a problem.

Its quite another to know the severity o the

problem and identiy where it is located. You

wouldnt x a aucet that isnt leaking, so why

would you tackle a duplicate content problem

that is practically nonexistent? We want to

show you how to measure the direct business

benet youll get rom patching up the leaks

your CMS leaves behind. It works wonders orus, and we are sure it will or you too.

Step one: establish a baseline or measure-

ment. First, determine how many pages your

site has. Add up your product pages, category

pages, and ancillary pages. The total number is

your real number o site pages. Consider two

key monthly metrics: 1) Revenue per page (total

site revenue pages indexed in Google) and 2)

Searches per page (total search clicks to your

site pages indexed in Google).

Step two: implement the change and wait. Fix

your duplicate content issues, or hire a proession-

al to do it or you. Then sit back and wait at least

one month beore you make another measure-

ment. Sometimes it takes a while beore Google

returns to crawl the extra pages on your site.

Step three: look or an increase in active pages

and trafc. What you measure next dependson your goals. I you are looking primarily or

increased revenue, as we all are, you want to

see an increase in the number o pages indexed.

Compare your revenue per page beore and ater

the duplicate content fx. The second metric to

consider is search clicks per page. Youll notice an

increase here i your site suered rom duplicate

pages that divided your audience and your links,

reducing your primary page reputation in Google.

I all went well, your canonical pages will rank

higher, and as they perorm better youll also in-

Will You Prot From Addressing Duplicate Content Issues?Heres a Surere Way to Know.


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crease your revenue. You should see an increase

in the number o unique pages receiving regular

search trac as well as an overall increase in

trac to your website. This increase usually

happens because Google crawled more o your

website and more o your pages made it onto

the search engine results page.

By now you realize that duplicate content prob-

lems happen all on their own, and it is up to you

to stop them beore you lose your rankings to

the competition. Even i you take care o every

piece o duplicate content today, you still will

have to deal with it periodically in the uture.The more content you add to your website, the

more likely duplicate pages will pop up. Its nice

to have a way to constantly keep it in check.

Most business owners wait until their next web-

site redesign to start tackling their duplicate

content problems, but this approach comes at

a huge cost. Each low-ranking page amounts

to customers who never

made it to your store.

Can you really aord

to lose a single sale

between now and your

next redesign?

Automatic duplicate

content management

is the only solution that

makes sense. When youallow our Lighthouse sot-

ware to consolidate your

content as you create it, your pages start to rank

better right out o the gate. You dont have to stop

what you are doing to handle a situation that can

easily get out o control. Its something we like to

call peace o mind.

I you are interested in ridding your site o dupli-

cate content problems or good, we encourage

you to give us a call. Well tell you more about

Lighthouse and how you can use it to take care

o your duplicate content automatically. Why go

through page ater page when sotware can do

all the dirty work? We created Lighthouse be-

cause youve got better things to do.

Heres What You Should Do Next

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Duplicate Content & ECom