SEO Tools

[johngwms]

It would be useful if some additional tools/flags could be made available for sections to improve page ranking when duplicate section names and products are being used.

My site needs to have duplicate identical products listed in more than one section to make my customers' seaching task easier. This means that those product descriptions and titles are diluted with the search engines.

I would like to be able to flag sections for exclusion with the search engine indexing by either Actinic maintaining the robots.txt file or other means within each section file itself.

John

[Mike Hughes]

I'm not sure why you think duplicate pages will dilute your pages ranking with the search engines. At worst what will happen is that Google will choose one of the duplicate pages that it considers 'best' for a particular search and ignore any others.

If you really want to block the search engines from a page you can do it with a noindex meta tag that you should be able to control using custom variables.

Mike

[johngwms]

Maybe I have misunderstood the affect of duplicate content. These pages also have near duplicate Titles which I am sure will having a diluting affect

I certainly want to have more control over the pages that searchers will be sent to so adding the noindex metatag would work.

Thank you for the suggestion.

John

[Mike Hughes]

Maybe I have misunderstood the affect of duplicate content. These pages also have near duplicate Titles which I am sure will having a diluting affect

Can you explain what you think is being diluted?

[johngwms]

Yes

It multiple pages have the same or similar content then Google is not going to rank any of those pages highly for the site. I assume that this is even more important for page Titles which seem to have more importance to Google.

In the case of duplicate products I would like to stop those products from being indexed by Google; only the primary producty being indexed. This should maximise the chance of the primary product being ranked highly by Google.

John

[leehack]

Do you have all duplicates together in certain sections or are they mixed up with other original products? If you have for example your products in normal sections and then in 'by price' or 'by brand' sections, i have a plugin that allows you to duplicate the product into these other sections and it automatically links itself back to the master product. Improves internal linking and removes duplicate pages and any associated problems you perceive with that area.

Best way i can illustrate this is to get you to click on the "Onkyo TX-NR609" on both of these pages (they're both the first products with the blue headers):

http://www.quantumelectronics.co.uk/...mplifiers.html
http://www.quantumelectronics.co.uk/acatalog/Onkyo.html

and note that they both take you to the same page.

The first link is a subsection with a product in it (SPP) and the second link is just a product, with a layout made to look like the section link layouts. Thus each product has a master page and each duplicate links to that master page.

Because custom design has to occur and that could only be done my end (mimicing the section layout to look like a custom product layout amongst other things), it's not the cheapest addon you will see, but everyone who uses, speaks very highly of it. The example site i showed you uses it extensively for by price sections, by feature sections and at christams uses it to provide xmas gifts by price tiers.

On the first link you can also see 'hottest products' at the top, it is used in there too so customers can add their own custom marketing lists with any name for the list and containing any products on any page. The custom marketing lists is not part of the addon, that's something separate, but it requires the duplicate addon to work.

[Mike Hughes]

It multiple pages have the same or similar content then Google is not going to rank any of those pages highly for the site. I assume that this is even more important for page Titles which seem to have more importance to Google.

This is all wrong. If Google finds multiple pages with the same content it just drops the ones it considers less important (i.e. that don't rank as well as what it considers to be the main one). There is no duplicate content penalty or dilution on the page it keeps in the index.

Mike

[johngwms]

This is the sort of thing that would work for me.

For example, I have a sub-section under Test Instruments called USB Multifunction Instruments.

Some USB Multifunction instruments can act as a Logic Analyser, Protocol Analyser etc.

I also have subsections under Test Instruments for Logic Analysers and Protocol Analysers. I have duplicates of the USB Test Instruments also listed there.

However, it does seem easier to me to just exclude the duplicates from the Google Index.

John

[leehack]

I agree with Mike, there is no dilution, they just choose to dump one of them, this is usually the youngest page IME, but if a younger page ranked better to them, i'm sure they happily drop the older one. Forget the word dilute, it's drop.

[johngwms]

OK, thank you. that is good news and clarify things.

However, I would prefer to be in control of which pages are listed in Google and I am concerned that will not happen if everything is indexed. Maybe I am worrying too much.

As an aside I have noticed that Google also displays pages that have been removed some time ago and I have had to setup 301 redirects to stop users being lost in the Ether.

John

[Mike Hughes]

However, I would prefer to be in control of which pages are listed in Google and I am concerned that will not happen if everything is indexed. Maybe I am worrying too much.

I think you probably are worrying too much.

By making the choice yourself, rather than letting Google do it, you have no way of knowing if the page you choose is going to do better or worse than the others would have. Why not just let Google choose the one that it thinks is best? (i.e. the one that will rank higher in the serps).

As an aside I have noticed that Google also displays pages that have been removed some time ago and I have had to setup 301 redirects to stop users being lost in the Ether.

Usually this is a sign that you aren't displaying the 404 'page not found' error for pages that no longer exist. If you show a page with a 200 OK result (or a 301/302 redirect) then google has no way of knowing the page has gone.

The best way to do this is to create a custom 404 page and use htaccess to display it. This way vistors don't get lost and the search engines know the page has gone and should be removed from the index.

Mike

[johngwms]

Thank you Mike. I appreciate your advice and will do as you suggest.

John

[leehack]

By making the choice yourself, rather than letting Google do it, you have no way of knowing if the page you choose is going to do better or worse than the others would have. Why not just let Google choose the one that it thinks is best? (i.e. the one that will rank higher in the serps).

This is the best bit of sage advice i've heard for a while, totally agree. If they choose the page you don't want them to, see that as a fantastic glance into their algo, breakdown the two pages and decipher why. Learn that and you'll be selling seo services in 3 months time. A/B testing with Google is simply one if not the best thing you can ever do if you want to learn how things work.

[johngwms]

Thinking about this issue some more, as I have duplicate content, Google is not going to be able to determine which page is more relevant from the page content.

This just leaves the Title to determine the relevancy, which does restrict my options. Are there any other ways of affecting the each page's relevancy for a particular search phrase?

I guess the only other way would be to be able to have customisable product descriptions for each duplicate page? Can that be done?

[leehack]

Thinking about this issue some more, as I have duplicate content, Google is not going to be able to determine which page is more relevant from the page content.

It's not just about page content, rest assured Google will rank one of them higher than the other, whether that be by outright ranking or choosing to drop a duplicate.

This just leaves the Title to determine the relevancy, which does restrict my options. Are there any other ways of affecting the each page's relevancy for a particular search phrase?

Think of links coming into the page for one, both internally and externally, collectively they have more weight than the areas which you are thinking about.

I guess the only other way would be to be able to have customisable product descriptions for each duplicate page? Can that be done?

Yes, you can set this in duplicate configuration in the settings menu.