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    Canonical URI issue

    Forgive me, I thought I'd be able to find a solution to this from a previous discussion but I haven't been able to dig anything up.

    We're using the new URI system for our Miva pages and I've noticed that we're getting flagged for duplicate content by our SEO tool (Moz Pro).

    For example, we might have a dining table that comes in both a fixed version and a version with an extension leaf. These would be two separate products and URL's.

    On our old MMUI site I'd just manually assign one of the two products as the canonical, but with the URI feature I have to specify a unique canonical for each product... which means the inevitable duplicate content issue.

    Any ideas on how we might be able to work around this? I have 172 "duplicate" pages to deal with at this moment
    Dylan Buchfink
    The Mattress & Sleep Company
    http://www.tmasc.ca/

    #2
    This comes down to how you want to display the products. If the only difference between the products is the leaf, it would be possible to combine them into a single product and have the leaf be an attribute to the product.

    However, there may be some reasons why you want it split out into separate products. In this case, you need to have separate product names, page titles and descriptions for each product.
    Brennan Heyde
    VP Product
    Miva, Inc.
    [email protected]
    https://www.miva.com

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      #3
      Thank you Brennan. Combining products certainly makes sense in many situations, but there are many others where we feel it's best to have them separated.

      Dylan Buchfink
      The Mattress & Sleep Company
      http://www.tmasc.ca/

      Comment


        #4
        There is a difference between 'duplicate content' and 'thin content'.

        Last summer Google went after sites that were thin in content which affect many ecommerce sites that, although may be somewhat unique, typically have boilerplate descriptions within a category.

        Many of the SEO tools are flagging thin content as duplicate content. You should only look at it as a recommendation and decide how to proceed.

        Go into your google webmaster tools and look at your site map and see how many of your pages are indexed. If >90% pages are indexed then you may not have a problem. If only 50% are indexed then you may want to consider adding content.

        One option is to set up some code to canonicalize the table with leaf to the table page. Both pages would have the same canonical tag. You could do this for a whole category but choosing which pages to NOT canonicalize could get dicey.

        I chose a different path and went through the laborious task last summer and added unique content to each product header section and descriptions. Since then, all my pages have been re-indexed, but the SEO tool still flags it as duplicate.

        I'm not an SEO guru so this is just my two cents so take it for what its worth.







        http://www.alphabetsigns.com/

        Comment


          #5
          Thank you alphabet, that is an interesting take on it, too.

          On our old MMUI site our fix was simple - we just manually specified the canonical. It's too bad the URI system won't allow the same canonical for two different products.
          Dylan Buchfink
          The Mattress & Sleep Company
          http://www.tmasc.ca/

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