Duplicate

[EdHarrison]

Extended info pages are seen in webmaster tools as duplicate content - this was a problem in 2014, SD gave me a fix but its back in 2016...

It seems it is not a coincidence that Google has put the majority of my products with extended info pages into omitted results!

I wonder is there a global easy way to noindex or nofollow extended info pages?

I have tried this but until Google recrawls a few times I just dont know

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="MSThemeCompatible" content="yes" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

Very frustrating as the majority of these products were page 1 - costly error again.

[Mike Hughes]

I always thought duplicate pages weren't a real problem for the pages concerned as Google will just include what they consider the stronger of the duplicates in the search results and omit the other pages.

So by telling Google not to index them all you're doing is exactly what they're doing already.

There might be an issue where lots of duplicate pages might be seen as a low quality indicator for to the website but that doesn't sound like the issue you're talking about.

So are you talking about wanting to block Google from the pages they're already omitting as duplicates? and if so why?

If you do want to achieve the same things as SD told you before then the easiest thing would be to let us know what they told you to do the last time and I'm sure we can help you achieve the same thing in 2016.

Mike

[EdHarrison]

Google sadly is not omitting just the duplicate but both versions, literally dozens of well ranked pages have now been placed in omitted results.

example:

Celestron Lithium Telescope PowerTank - Harrison Telescopes
https://www.harrisontelescopes.co.uk/acatalog/celestron-lithium-powertank.html
Celestron Lithium PowerTank for powering telescopes efficiently with a life of 10 years with greener design than traditional batteries.


Harrison Telescopes Limited Celestron Lithium PowerTank
https://www.harrisontelescopes.co.uk/acatalog/info-18771.html
Astronomy Telescopes, Binoculars, Mounts, Eyepieces, Filters and Accessories from SkyWatcher, Celestron, Meade, Baader, Helios, Coronado, Lunt, Bresser ...

This was a page 1 top seller for weeks, until 2 days ago, there are over 60 examples of this.

I think there are a few reasons, the extended info pages takes the meta description for the parent in other words all extended info pages have the same meta description, resulting in a warning in webmaster tools.

In addition the title tag is replicated in both the product page and extended info page, Google does not like duplicate content - especially the single most important part the title tag. considering I pointed this out to SD with 2014 they release 2016 (including an updated release) with this terrible SEO error.

I was in two minds, delete info pages (but Google still looks for pages it has previously indexed forever) - or try the nofollow / noindex in the hope Google sees this change and accepts it as a fix.

Who knows, all I know is I have lost very important ranked pages and revenue, any help appreciated.

[Mike Hughes]

It's strange but those pages do seem to have been removed / deindexed / deranked in the serps.

I'd be surprised if it's the info pages that are doing this, but your noindex, nofollow should sort that if it is.

I can't help wondering if the problem might be that the the majority of description on your page is identical to that on the Celestron page. If the noindex, nofollow doesn't work then I'd try adding more unique content to the page. i.e. it might be seen as being duplicate to other sites pages rather than your own.

Where you have used unique content such as

This portable clean solution to powering a computerised telescope in the field uses a greener design than traditional batteries

then a search for this does bring up the page in the serps so the pages haven't been completely de-indexed.

Mike

[EdHarrison]

Thanks, I am going to check daily in webmaster tools to see if the duplicates drop in number, my guess is the duplicate title tag is the culprit as the meta is just a warning, why oh why is an out of the box new install SD2016 allowing duplicate title tags to appear......

New products will not have info pages to see if they rank better, it puzzled me for ages why new products ranked well for weeks then got omitted - I guess after subsequent crawls Google found the extended info pages then demoted that and the original.

I wont hold my breath about products being indexed again, I have never seen one come back from omitted yet...

[brucet]

why oh why is an out of the box new install SD2016 allowing duplicate title tags to appear

The software allows you to have whatever you want for the title tags, but out of the box it's never generated duplicates, at least not for as long as I can remember. Could that be carried over from an earlier design, or a design customisation?

Out of the box the Title tag on the Product Page takes the product name; on Subsection pages it takes the Subsection name; and on Extended Information pages it takes the company name followed by the product name.

You can restore that either by reverting your Extended Information Page layouts to factory settings (although that will lose any other customisations in the layouts); or by editiing them to replace

<title><actinic:variable name="ProductName" /></title>

with

<title><actinic:variable name="CompanyName" /> <actinic:variable name="ProductName" /></title>

In the meantime you seem to have deleted the Extended Info page and the product page is definitely now indexed, https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourc...hium+PowerTank. So that may be the safest tactic anyway.

[EdHarrison]

Thank you, yes I just did not want to risk it any more, when I say title in the html of the extended info page it clearly shows the title as the same wording as the product page but of course generates a new url, so your site does end up with two pages with identicle title tage and separate url's.

I think this happens if your title is the same as the product name.

Then of course it duplicates the meta description from the store main page and uses this on every extended info page.

This was fixed by your support team in 2015 for me as a temporary thing but I am really surprised it still exists in this latest release.

By the way this is a new install, only product text and images etc were carefully imported to avoid historic code issues.

I am not keen on pop up pages, it was just a way of displaying a larger product image, it would be nice to see an image zoom or similar

[brucet]

it clearly shows the title as the same wording as the product page

As I say, that's not how SellerDeck works out of the box, for at least the past several versions. It's either carried over from an older design, or it must have been customised that way at some point. If you want a unique Title tag on extended information pages, the steps I described above should achieve that.

It is true that extended information pages don't have unique Meta Description tags. They are not ideal from an SEO perspective in today's world, mainly because they were designed as popups for larger images or additional product information, not as full-blown web pages. That was one reason for the introduction of Product Pages in v11.

All the same, duplicate Meta Descriptions won't get you a duplicate content penalty if the content of each page is distinct. And unique Title and Meta Description tags won't protect you from it if the page content is very similar.

If you still need to handle the Meta Description tag properly in extended information pages, message me directly and I can send you a workaround for it.