Sellerdeck Pagination and Duplicate SEO Content

[leej]

Hi everyone,
Happy New Year to you all! I have been working on a client site recently which is using pagination to break up a section with a lot of products.

My business partner who deals with the marketing of our Sellerdeck has pointed out a potential issue which may affect organic listings for Sellerdeck sites,

Example.
We have a section that contains 16 products in total. Its overall page name is toys.html.

Within toys.html we have a product called TEDDYBEAR.

We split the pages into four so that only 4 products show per page. These four pages are entitled:
toys-p1.html
toys-p2.html
toys-p3.html
toys-p4.html

TEDDYBEAR would display is toys-p3.html

The issue (we think) is that Google would consider the TEDDYBEAR product that is displayed within toys.html and toys-p3.html uses duplicate content as they are completely seperate pages with the same content.

I hope that makes sense. Has anyone encountered issue with their sections not being indexed? I look forward to hearing from anyone.

[Mike Hughes]

I can't see what the problem would be.

There is a much longer answer but I'm not sure your partner's paranoia is sufficient reason to spend time on it. Don't sweat the small stuff and if you are tempted then the best thing to do would to go away and read about it rather than asking others.

Mike

PS. I'm try trying to be light hearted on this but the sentiment is pretty much what I'm thinking.

[peblaco]

SellerDeck 2013 canonical tags

SellerDeck 2013 by default includes a canonical tag which is activated for paginated pages. The code is in the "Standard Meta Tags" layout. Look at the source code of your website paginated pages i.e. "page-p1.html" and you should see a canonical tag <link rel="canonical" href="page.html"> to tell search engines the preferred page.

[Buzby]

I have my products sorted by brand (real products) and item (filtered products)

I have noticed that if I have a filtered page to show all silver earrings for example, and the page is paginated, the canonical link is now coded to a hard linked page despite there being no content on there at all.

Surely this is only showing a blank page, which by its nature is now a duplicate of all my other filtered pages which are also blank.

Would it be better if I was to hard code a Canonical link using a variable ( I have does this already at product level) to one of the filter urls? I am assuming that it would not then matter which of the dynamic filtered pages was viewed by google, it would have a canonical link to my choice of best sellers, new products or whatever I choose.

[peblaco]

Can you post a link to the page?.

[Buzby]

Hi Louise,

Sorry I can't as shortly after my post I set to work on making a variable to to work around the problem.

I now have a variable at section level where I can choose my owl Url for the canonical link which is my prefered option. It allows me to decide which page, and order I would prefer Google to use. Currently set as all products in bestseller order.

Kind regards

Jason

[peblaco]

You mentioned a filtered page with canonical tag and a blank page. EDIT: If you are using Sellerdeck 2013 and added your own canonical tags you cannot use variable store folder if you are using filtering as it should be a cgi-bin link and affects search engines. See: http://community.sellerdeck.com/showthread.php?t=55375

[Buzby]

I Louise,

Many thanks for that, I am astounded by your knowledge and eagerness to help.

I am still developing the site and may have to revisit this at a later date but you have certainly given me something to think about.

Incidentally I have removed all the client filtering boxes and only use the filters to generate a page.

Example HERE you may see some strange things in the html going on with the canonical tag, this is just where I am playing with it.

Kind regards

Jason

[peblaco]

It looks like that page does not exist on the site as it is not accessible from the parent section, but the page is still on the server. I can see your canonical tag is incorrect. It is showing a format of "page name .html 4 of 4". You may have some incorrect coding which you need to check. You could post the code you have entered into the software.

[Buzby]

Hi Lousie

The 4 of 4 is just to show me which part of the code does what on the website and will be removed at a later date.

[peblaco]

I now have a variable at section level where I can choose my owl Url for the canonical link

If using SellerDeck 2013 filtering and canonical tags you can't use the variable store folder it causes an issue for search engines listings as they can't index content. See fix at: http://community.sellerdeck.com/showthread.php?t=55375