Comments on: Too Many URLs Spoil the SEO: Fixing a Common Ecommerce Duplicate Content Problem

By: Bloggers Digest Resurrected: Ecommerce Links for September 2009 | Get Elastic

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:18:28 +0000

[...] optimization: Google now lets you strip parameters from URLs. You now have a better weapon against duplicate content issues than the canonical URL [...]

By: supra shoes

supra shoes — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:26:49 +0000

serius proble, deserve a second thought about this.

By: Genewize

Genewize — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:41:40 +0000

Very good post. this common mistake can be easily overlooked and cery costly for some businesses. Thanks for the info, and great looking blog btw.

-Justin

By: Ani López

Ani López — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:26:55 +0000

Alex, duplicate content in your site it is not a penalty issue, it is about not consistent Information Architecture.

Andrew, In my opinion canonical tag is the last solution to implement so Lets get back to the origin:

Choose the categorization that brings you more relevant traffic, then articulate the rest of the secondary categories (navigational options) but when linking to a product use the URL produced at the main category structure.

Information Architecture will improve Usability but also will help you to let the search engines indexing systems understand your content the way you want not as a bunch of unorganised words

By: Elliptical

Elliptical — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:56:32 +0000

Good information. canonical tag can be used to tell the search engines about your preferred page. But be careful when using it as it may create an infinite loop. like in page1 you may say canonical=page2 and in page2 if you say canonical=page1.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:39:47 +0000

I mentioned it before in comments, the advantage over the canonical tag is, the canonical tag, though supported is taken as a “hint” not a “directive” by search engines

http://www.getelastic.com/canonical-url-tag/

Rather than creating duplicate content, you redirect your navigational clicks to the product page – no category parameters. This also creates less pages for crawlers to spider – which means your site can get indexed more deeply. Search engines still can crawl and index your duplicate pages, but the canonical tag tells them which one you prefer to display in results. Search engines have the option to override your “hint” – which means the search engine must keep all the other copies of the page in case it deems one more relevant than your canonical.

By: Brendon

Brendon — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:53:23 +0000

Can some one describe about the global alias concept and how its better than canonical tags.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:40:51 +0000

Sometimes it’s worst; a completely wrong title is displayed in the Yahoo listing!!!!!!!!!!!!!

sometimes for the same website Home page, 3 different titles are shown!!!

By: stuckinacubicle

stuckinacubicle — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:25:44 +0000

You could also use a canonical tag and that will eliminate duplicate content. With the Canonical Tag you could change the url to appear as a vanity URL in Google.

Most Analytics packages will allow you to change the dynamic parameter to a vanity url for reporting purposes. This will allow you to know which pages visitors are going to.

By: Idris

Idris — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:19:30 +0000

That’s a great catch linda.

I too have seen this problem in most of the ecommerce sites. Thanks for sharing few promising solution.