SEO for eCommerce – Again

If you’re now heading to click back away from this page: STOP!! You haven’t read this before! Plus I get punished if the bounce rate on my blogs is high :(

We’ve already covered the issue with duplicate content on a previous posting, or a next posting if you’re reading this in the order the blogs were written in (confused? You will be), but there is more to sorting out duplication in eCommerce websites than simply making sure you have your canonical tags in place and making sure Google knows all about your lovely optimised Friendly URLs (What are Friendly URLs? I hear you cry… Tough, I can’t tell you everything… unless you come on one of our SEO training courses that is)

The canonical Tag has two major purposes: dealing with exactly duplicated page, those that are exactly the same across two URLs – such as a URL that uses database parameters and a friendly URL, and in part in protecting your unique content from scrapers (nasty little programs that gobble up your copy and regurgitate it as a pile of nonsensical phrases on a spammy little website for no purpose than to have a place to put even spammier links). Scraped content can be similar enough to the original to count and historically it was this kind of thing that Google Sic’ed Panda on. The canonical tag is often proof enough of the originality of your own content.

The canonical tag is not a good solution for those pages which are necessarily almost exactly the same.

Which pages are necessarily similar and can lead to Duplicate Penalties?

In eCommerce websites the main culprits for penalties caused by close duplication of content are paginated search results and category pages. Category pages should always have a good amount of text to help with relevance to your main search queries, however they are often left bare as putting good content on these pages can cause a problem when the only difference is the few words that make up the list of products.

Catch 22. How do we get out of this vicious cycle?

For paginated pages Google has recently (in September) given us the “prev” and “next” tags. Implementing these tags allows you to give Google a sense of context to these pages, showing that they lead onto other, very similar pages. In this way you can fulfil SEO requirements by publishing enough text to get your pages noticed, without incurring a duplicate penalty for pages that contain a majority of duplicated content.