Duplicate Product Pages No Follow

[Nigelb]

We've been trying to get our heads round the issue of no follow instructions on duplicate product pages.

The recommended solution to duplicate product pages is to put a no follow code into the head tag, and to say which is the parent page, but as we use master templates, we're not sure how to do this without affecting every page.

Have been reading some threads on here, but we're not that techie and the code looks complicated.

Or whether the answer is to create a customvar and then put a conditional statement in the head tag that says if there's a value in the custom var then put the html no follow code in, but if it's blank, leave the code out.
Is that possible? and what would the code be?

Does anyone know?

We use Actinic v9.05 btw

[leehack]

That's the idea yes, create a true/false variable, with false set as the default setting, then add your code into the template and wrap a blockif around that code that shows the code when the variable is set to false. Buy default it will not show then, but will where you set it to true. The blockif tutorials in the forum are the best to learn this stuff.

[Nigelb]

Thanks Lee.

Will the method you suggest allow us to specify the relevant parent product page in the var of each duplicate? ie for each duplicate page we want to be able to tell search engines which is the best (parent product) page to list - it'll be different for every duplicate

[leehack]

Yes because you will be able to make your variable editable on duplicates (settings menu), so can edit them independent of each other. There are other ways of doing what you want to though, either using cut down duplicates, or fragments with links to the master pages or auto solutions that link duplicates back to the master products. There's been considerable chat about all of those options in the past, maybe worth looking through those to make sure you're choosing the best solution for your situation. On the surface your option sounds a little clunky and possibly fraught with long term mistakes.

[Nigelb]

Yes, we've been looking at some of the previous threads, but haven't quite found any that just address this question directly, the ones we found seem to be different situations.

Do you have a link to any of the threads?

[leehack]

I don't sorry no, just remember reading and contributing in them quite a bit.

[completerookie]

Nigel,
I see youv'e already looked at This thread but you've asked questions on it. ( I missed the question you posted, otherwise, I would have replied, sorry)

I'll answer the question you posted on that thread shortly, but if you have one product per page, then this is a solution that works. We use it.
the subtle thing you have to keep in mind is that you need to decide WHICH page is the MASTER, as all duplicates point back to the master.
Not all search engines recognise the canonical metatag, but all the big ones do (and that's probably what matters)

in a nutshell, the code is 100% complete and you may need to change the lines (there's two of them) to point to v9 or v10, but thats all. - see the actual thread.

kev

[PatchworkRabbit]

If you use SPP and your duplicate products are total duplicates, then have you considered just using fragments linking back to the original product? It's super easy to do (by far the easiest method for creating dupe content) and because there is no physical duplicates, you don't annoy the bots AND you generate internal links, which the bots (allegedly) like.

I do it all over the place on my site.

http://www.patchwork-rabbit.co.uk/ac...halloween.html

All of those "items" are actually just fragments where the LINK has been set to redirect to the product page (using a URL, not a product link which goes via the CGI-BIN or something).

And it doesn't look any different to any other page on my site.