Duplicate content is a huge problem for many eCommerce sites, for the following examples we’ll be looking at Magento because that is what we specialize in here at InteractOne. After you’ve done all the basic SEO on your site the rest of the issues relating to duplicate content and/or nearly similar content for products that you’re selling have to be a top priority.Moving on to these advanced SEO tips to solve these issues.Here’s a list of URLs with exactly the same content that you’d find in Magento:
- Yourdomain.com/product.html
- Yourdomain.com/categoryA/product.html
- Yourdomain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1
- Yourdomain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/category/1
Along with these pages, you’ll find pages like product reviews, with almost the exact same content. Categories are another problem you’ll run into; you get a ton of duplicate content with layered navigation and option sorting. What does all of this mean? Worst case scenario Product “A” is also on 4 other pages.
Ideally you want to get rid of all those duplicate content pools; however you want them to be spidered but not indexed.
You’ll also need to fix the sorting options and layered navigation for categories.
In order to do this you’ll need to add Noindex, follow for non-content pages What this does, is keep the search engines from actually indexing these pages all of the links will still be followed.
The next step to optimizing your eCommerce site is to nofollow all unnecessary links, those links are your login page, checkout, whishlist, and all other non content pages. Other pages you need to include in this list are RSS feeds, layered navigation, add to whishlist, and add to compare types of pages.
The third item on the advanced list is Canonical URLs, these help search engines understand the duplicate content of your pages and suggest the preferred version of the URL for each page.
The last item is XML site maps, XML sitemaps are a way to let search engines know where your content is. It’s not going to get you rank; however it might get you indexed faster.
You can put this line of code in your robots file: Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to point search engines to your sitemap.
Of course you’ll have to remember to generate a new sitemap as your products change.
As always if you need help optimizing your eCommerce site feel free to contact us for a free consultation.