Duplicate content particularly on Opencart?

[OnlineMenusCornwall]

Before I start spending loads of time figuring out the structure of my new site...

I've heard a couple of different theories on this so thought I would try and get a definitive answer from you guys, especially the SEO experts out there.

If a product page on my opencart site is, for example:

www.domain.com/catergory1/productname.html

but the same product is also in another catergory, eg.

www.domain.com/caterygory2/productname.html

Would Google class this as duplicate content even though it is on the same domain name and penalise?

Thanks in advance.

 

[fisicx]

Yes.

Which is why you should use rel='canonical'

Here's how it works

 

[OnlineMenusCornwall]

What a nightmare! Not sure Opencart is the one for me now, bugger!

 

[JonathanSEO]

You can get various Opencart extensions that implement rel canonical as well as a load of other SEO features.

VQmod installs. Takes 2 seconds.

 

[dtc]

Opencart sets rel="canonical" if you have seo urls on - format is site.com/seoproductid.html.

Just setting up a store now and can highly recommend for customisation and just doing things how I want them.

Mind I was using Clickcartpro so anything would be better!

Darren

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

[OnlineMenusCornwall]

That's weird. I've set SEO friendly URLS but mine shows as:-

domain/catergory/producturl

If I view the product through brand or another category it shows as:-

domain/brand/producturl or domain/catergory2/producturl

So, potentially 3 different URL's for one product.

Any suggestions?

 

[Remys]

Google DOES NOT penalise anyone for duplicate content, they just ignore it and only rank one of them. If you haven't noticed all Google shows on its News page is DUPLICATE CONTENT, and that is normal practise on the web.

One of the duplicate pages will be indexed the other ignored so it does not hog Google's resources but that is all.

What people may think of as a penalty is if duplicate content appears on different domains, as they generally give the first one they found priority.

Search for "in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form" and you get over 3,600,000 results. Now unless everyone has rewritten the Bible then you have a lot of duplicates.

 

[dtc]

That's weird. I've set SEO friendly URLS but mine shows as:-

domain/catergory/producturl

If I view the product through brand or another category it shows as:-

domain/brand/producturl or domain/catergory2/producturl

So, potentially 3 different URL's for one product.

Any suggestions?

Yes, right click on the page, select "View Source" and search for "canonical". You will find the code that tells search engines which url to use.

Then ignore the generated ones as they should not be relevant.

Darren



Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

[OnlineMenusCornwall]

Google DOES NOT penalise anyone for duplicate content, they just ignore it and only rank one of them. If you haven't noticed all Google shows on its News page is DUPLICATE CONTENT, and that is normal practise on the web.

One of the duplicate pages will be indexed the other ignored so it does not hog Google's resources but that is all.

What people may think of as a penalty is if duplicate content appears on different domains, as they generally give the first one they found priority.

Search for "in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form" and you get over 3,600,000 results. Now unless everyone has rewritten the Bible then you have a lot of duplicates.

I found this on Googles Webmaster Tools page.

"In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results."

OK, this is the problem I'm having with different opinions. If indeed my site will be penalised, ranked lower or indexed lower in general, I'll structure the site a little differently although I would rather have the same product in different catergories.

 

[OnlineMenusCornwall]

However, it also says the following, which leaves me with the view that Google won't count it as malicious and therefor won't penalise the ranking/indexing...

Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

 

[webgeek]

I'd never consider using Canonical when there's a better choice available, namely: meta robots. NOINDEX, FOLLOW - you get crawled without indexed and the search engines obey it.

We've got a client who 301'd a bunch of links to clean things up on their site. Several of those pointed to pages which had Canonical tags in the header, pointing to other pages as the 'real' page for that topic. Guess what Google did.. Ignored every Canonical where a 301 was pointing to it.

Remember Canonical is a suggestion, and a weak one at that. Stick the noindex, follow on your dupe categories and you'll be smiling.

 

[OnlineMenusCornwall]

That's something Google doesn't recommend also..

Google does not recommend blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.

So does that mean that Googlebot still crawls noindex pages but just doesn't index them?

 

[webgeek]

Yep, NOINDEX,FOLLOW = crawl this page and follow links beyond, but don't put this page in the index.

They can crawl. That's the difference between meta robots = noindex,follow vs robots.txt disallow /....

 

[JonathanSEO]

I'd never consider using Canonical when there's a better choice available, namely: meta robots. NOINDEX, FOLLOW - you get crawled without indexed and the search engines obey it.

We've got a client who 301'd a bunch of links to clean things up on their site. Several of those pointed to pages which had Canonical tags in the header, pointing to other pages as the 'real' page for that topic. Guess what Google did.. Ignored every Canonical where a 301 was pointing to it.

Remember Canonical is a suggestion, and a weak one at that. Stick the noindex, follow on your dupe categories and you'll be smiling.

Rel Canonical is a better solution in this instance. What I see being described is one product in 2 different categories.

The way I think Opencart does canonical URL's anyway means the canonical version of a product is without the category slug in the URL.

So e.g. if it's listed in /mobile-phone-covers/iphone-rubber-cover.html

&

/mobile-accessories-sale/iphone-rubber-cover.html

Then the rel canonical would be /iphone-rubber-cover.html

Noindexing category pages would be pointless as they're not duplicates, they just have product crossover. You'll likely want them to be both used as organic landing pages so if you drop one from the index then I doubt you will be smiling.

 

[webgeek]

View source on those 2 categories and you'll find they have blocks of identical text aka duplicates.

Hopefully OpenCart handles the multiple category / hierarchical category canonicals better than Magento. Have been working on de-duping a dozen of them the past couple of months and it's a nightmare, by design.

Best practice would be to Canonical the dupe products over to the single 'real' URL while noindex, following the categories (all except the 'real' one you're trying to rank)

The above is IMHO, your mileage may vary.

 

[transpacific]

If you are providing a canonical link that means you are explicitly indicating to Google bot that there is a master and this one is duplicate. The product will be skipped from getting indexed. A Waste.
If your product is listed in category2; then it is a different product ( for non humans like spiders and bots). Why hide it.
Do following: OpenCart has free SEO plugins
Install it and use different Title description and keyword tags. Bot will never pick it up as duplicate
Also there is a semantic Rich data tagging plugin Google " GR rich snippet for opencart" use these both and provide different meta tags.
Prashant Telang TransPacific Software
Note: My company TransPacific Sofware is the developer of GR Rich snippet