Duplicate content

English Spreadshop
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#1

Hi, I’ve got products i categories, for example Film T Shirts, all T shirts in there have a URL of film+t+shirts/tshirtname but also the original product page URL. So in effect whenever a t shirt is in a category there is a duplicate page. Is there any way to prevent this from happening?

I’ve also seen (I can’t remember quite how to do it) when you go from one category to another it then creates yet another page /category1/category2/tshirtname

If there is a way to fix this it would be a massive help, there isn’t really much point in doing any SEO if this can’t be fixed

Thanks
Pete

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#2

Hey, sorry to leave you hanging!

What’s your shop ID? Or could you give me some example URLs?

With this info I can’t really troubleshoot :frowning:

#3

Hi, the shop ID is 266158
An example of a duplicated product would be;
In a category - Page not found - Stolen T Shirts
The original URL not in a category - Page not found - Stolen T Shirts
So if there is a way to default all URLs like this to one single product page would be ideal. Is there a way to set this? I suspect if I add it to more categories it will create more duplicate content?
I could set a redirect up through the site (wordpress) on each specific URL but I’m not sure how this would affect the shop.
Thanks
Pete

#4

Hi Pete,
this behaviour was not introduced by the Spreadshop, but by your custom integration.
You have created custom pages for every category in your Shop and integrated the Spreadshop on those pages. All the Spreadshop does is include the Article ID and name at the end of the URL, never the categories.
This ‘duplicate content’ you are referring to was actually created by yourself, by integrating the shop at multiple places of your site.
Cheers
Sebastian

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#5

Hmm, I’ll have to have another look. I thought by using the categories I’d be able to have a page for each of them to display products only from that category and use this in my navigation.
Is there a way around this? I.e. to be able to have a navigation on my site that points to a particular category showing the products in that category, each of which linking back to the product without creating duplicated pages with different URLs?
Thanks
Pete

#6

I see what you are trying to achieve. Unfortunately, it is not that easy to do. I have two ideas how to circumvent the issues, both with trade-offs.

First, You could remove the category name from the URL in the links of your custom navigation. For example, https://stolentshirts.com/stolen-t-shirts/products/funny+t+shirts?q=T288565 would become https://stolentshirts.com/stolen-t-shirts/products?q=T288565. Sure, you would lose the category name in the URL, but there would be not duplicate content on different detail page URLs.

The second option would be to set the canonical URLs of the Detail Pages. It is the <link rel="canonical" href="..."> element in the head of your page. You would point it to the Detail Page URL without the category in the URL and thus avoid a duplicate content penalty by search engines. This is highly dependent on the system you use and I am afraid I cannot help you with how to achieve this. Just an idea for you to explore.

#7

Hi, sorry for not getting back, I’ve had some tome to get back onto this. Your first solution seems to have worked a treat. Thanks for your help, much appreciated!

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