SEO duplicated content

Hello.
I dont know if this question is already posted. I have do some search e dont find anything.

Well i have installed opencart and found that each product is listed in 2 different urls:
example:
http://www.my-store.com/index.php?route ... uct_id=190
http://www.my-store.com/index.php?route ... uct_id=190

You think this can have some impact in SEO if google see this as duplicated content?

thanks

I think the different URLs depends on the way you reach the product page.

For example if you are linked to it direct from the home page via latest products, there are one URL, and if you are reaching it via Category>product there will be another URL,

I dont think this effects the SEO result, but Im not sure.

No it wont bother google, or any decent search engine as millions of sites have urls like that. Google wont penalise you for it

amplifywebdesign wrote:No it wont bother google, or any decent search engine as millions of sites have urls like that. Google wont penalise you for it

Says who? Google? where?

amplifywebdesign wrote:No it wont bother google, or any decent search engine as millions of sites have urls like that. Google wont penalise you for it

Says who? Google? where?

tommix wrote:

amplifywebdesign wrote:No it wont bother google, or any decent search engine as millions of sites have urls like that. Google wont penalise you for it

Says who? Google? where?

If Google finds a url going to the same page, then it ignores it. Being as the url is dynamic it is not very important which one Google indexes anyway. It won't index the same page twice.

These comments are not true. Duplicate content is potentially a huge problem on a website (not talking about dup. content cross domain, talking about dup. content on a single domain).

Saying "it is not very important which one Google indexes anyway" is completely missing the what and why of site optimization for search. It is also completely incorrect.

Imagine a site (not talking about Open Cart for the moment) where 500 links point to page A, and 500 point to page B. Now, imagine you have 300 products on your site, all with a page A and a page B each.

Google crawls this site, by following links, and discovers vast amounts of duplicated content. It then removes many dup. content pages from the Index. Now you are left with only all your page As (for example only) in the index, and you have lost over half the links pointing to your website in the process.

Links are the strongest factor in search engine ranking, so dup. content, or unoptimized site architecture generally, does have a negative effect on site rankings once it reaches the point of large sections of your site being removed from the index.

I am just getting into Open Cart, so I have no idea yet how much of a problem this is. But, the real factor is links. does the CMS itself generate many links to these different versions of the same content? Possible solutions are fixing this in the core or with an extension (like SEO Strict URLs in modxcms.com) or, if the problem is not huge and the site is relatively small, setting up some 301 redirects in htaccess.

If you have any more questions about dup content and SEO I'd be glad to help.

amplifywebdesign wrote:

tommix wrote:

amplifywebdesign wrote:No it wont bother google, or any decent search engine as millions of sites have urls like that. Google wont penalise you for it

Says who? Google? where?

If Google finds a url going to the same page, then it ignores it. Being as the url is dynamic it is not very important which one Google indexes anyway. It won't index the same page twice.

no, google will not tolerate it, it is important to set no folllow

i think if the titles are the same it would ony choose one.

Daniel wrote:i think if the titles are the same it would ony choose one.

No, there is no need to guess.

This issue is one of the most documented in SEO.

My post above gives an outline. The bigger a site is, and the more links that point to pages (internal site links and links from other domains) that are dups, the more problematic this becomes.

Hanz_knife also points out rel="nofollow" can be used but this is very dangerous if you make a mistake, and/or it is hard to tweak open cart so that a rel="nofollow" meta tag can be added to certain pages, but not to the one that YOU decide is the canonical resource.

It is also possible to use the new canonical metatag that google/yahoo/microsoft introduced together around 6 months ago. Actually, this is a great tag and one reason it was created was specifically to help search engines with dup. content created by CMSs. Again, to use this properly, there would have to be a friendly way in Open Cart to set your own canonical link for each product, and dup content pages would have the canonical tag in the head telling search engines where the "preferred" resource URL is located.

Read about canonical meta tag here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... nical.html

http://yoast.com/canonical-url-links/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-ur ... e-sitemaps

Daniel, please do not underestimate the importance of this - it is much more complex than something that is solved by shared page titles. Even the canonical tag is a kind of band aid for webmasters who can't contrl the way their CMSes duplicate content.

I agree with towerofbabel. OpenCart is better when handling SEO URL compared to PrestaShop except for this 'canonical URL problems'.

I'd prefer only one single URL to my product. If there are more than one URLs, not only it produces duplicate contents, it also reduces the 'convergence' result of my product's SEO result.

In other words, if I only have one URL for one product, let's say that the URL gain 100 points (hypothetical points). But I have two URLs, that 100 is then divided into two portions. If there are three URLs, that 100 is then divided into three portions, etc.

And our URLs are competing against each other. This is not good, since we have to compete against our competitors.

Balls.

Google will not 'punish' you for duplicate content on your own site or even if its on a few other places online. Matt Cutts says you can have upto 3 duplicate articles on your own site.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate ... -question/

You 'SEO Gurus' should just chill, if you are using white hat techniques and trying to help google out as much as possible then you will be fine.

A few duplicate lines of text will do sweet fa!

ThePath wrote:Balls.

Google will not 'punish' you for duplicate content on your own site or even if its on a few other places online. Matt Cutts says you can have upto 3 duplicate articles on your own site.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate ... -question/

You 'SEO Gurus' should just chill, if you are using white hat techniques and trying to help google out as much as possible then you will be fine.

A few duplicate lines of text will do sweet fa!

No, sorry, you are compounding it to one issue (penalty), and it is not. If you read my posts, you will see that the emphasis is not on penalty, but on "canonicalization". This is not the same issue!

The simple explaination:

1000 links -> one page - that page is really strong, trusted, and ranks highly.

1000 links -> 3 pages (because people linked to different versions of the same product) - a dilution of the authority and trust that links indicate (search engine algorithms place huge emphasis on links), by spreading links over three pages of dup content instead of one.

What happens then?

Google sees three pages all with strong back links (300 links each) and says hmm, these three are all the same, I'll only show one in search results.

the result?

Instead of 1000 quality links, only 300 are helping your website rank.

ThePath, please try to understand, you do not fully understand the issue if you think it is all about punishment and penalty.

My post was not directed completely towards you tower and yes I am completely aware of the fact that Google and other engines put a lot of emphasis on links....but this mainly goes towards Page Rank which if you are an SEO on the pulse is a dying function.

Google is moving away from the importance of Page Rank and to the importance of good content. Content is King. How many times have you seen a site on page 1 with no page rank and 0 backlinks etc. I have done this with many of my sites. I have also seen PR1's consistantly outranking PR3,4's.

OK yes its important but Page Rank aint everything dude! And if you have 1000 links my guess is you have been getting links from rubbishy directories etc which Google doesnt really care about or your site is mega popular and these are great organic links from higher PR sites, in which case dont worry about the SEO as you will be doing fine. If you could achieve 10-50 organic links from good PR sites your PR would be greatly improved. Hundreds/thousands of directory or reciprocal links will do bugger all....trust me Ive wasted hours and hours adding to directories.

ps this thread was originally started and entitled 'duplicate content' not SEO link juice!

ThePath wrote:My post was not directed completely towards you tower and yes I am completely aware of the fact that Google and other engines put a lot of emphasis on links....but this mainly goes towards Page Rank which if you are an SEO on the pulse is a dying function.

Google is moving away from the importance of Page Rank and to the importance of good content. Content is King. How many times have you seen a site on page 1 with no page rank and 0 backlinks etc. I have done this with many of my sites. I have also seen PR1's consistantly outranking PR3,4's.

OK yes its important but Page Rank aint everything dude! And if you have 1000 links my guess is you have been getting links from rubbishy directories etc which Google doesnt really care about or your site is mega popular and these are great organic links from higher PR sites, in which case dont worry about the SEO as you will be doing fine. If you could achieve 10-50 organic links from good PR sites your PR would be greatly improved. Hundreds/thousands of directory or reciprocal links will do bugger all....trust me Ive wasted hours and hours adding to directories.

ps this thread was originally started and entitled 'duplicate content' not SEO link juice!

sorry man, it comes across that your knowledge of "SEO" is from official google statements. We can talk about content is king all day, but as anyone who does competitive webmastering/seo/marketing on a commercial site, content is nothing without authority.

Authority is still based on links, no matter what the official word from google.

PageRank is dying, but links are not.

Maybe in a few years we'll move to a totally behavior driven form of web indexing, till then...

towerofbabel wrote:

ThePath wrote:My post was not directed completely towards you tower and yes I am completely aware of the fact that Google and other engines put a lot of emphasis on links....but this mainly goes towards Page Rank which if you are an SEO on the pulse is a dying function.

Google is moving away from the importance of Page Rank and to the importance of good content. Content is King. How many times have you seen a site on page 1 with no page rank and 0 backlinks etc. I have done this with many of my sites. I have also seen PR1's consistantly outranking PR3,4's.

OK yes its important but Page Rank aint everything dude! And if you have 1000 links my guess is you have been getting links from rubbishy directories etc which Google doesnt really care about or your site is mega popular and these are great organic links from higher PR sites, in which case dont worry about the SEO as you will be doing fine. If you could achieve 10-50 organic links from good PR sites your PR would be greatly improved. Hundreds/thousands of directory or reciprocal links will do bugger all....trust me Ive wasted hours and hours adding to directories.

ps this thread was originally started and entitled 'duplicate content' not SEO link juice!

sorry man, it comes across that your knowledge of "SEO" is from official google statements. We can talk about content is king all day, but as anyone who does competitive webmastering/seo/marketing on a commercial site, content is nothing without authority.

Authority is still based on links, no matter what the official word from google.

PageRank is dying, but links are not.

Maybe in a few years we'll move to a totally behavior driven form of web indexing, till then...

Also, you need to fully understand the relationship between "content is king" and links. Focusing on content does not negate the importance of links in any way at all.

The content is king argument is based on the assumption that good content will be referenced (ie - linked to).

And any, back to the core of the discussion, if there is still any doubt that duplicate content is an issue, Google just now announced yet another way to deal with dup. content issues at the index level:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... -with.html

They certainly invest a hell of a lot into this, which makes one wonder why people still insist that dup. content is not a problem.

Of course, the best way to deal with dup. content is to nip it in the bud at the level of the CMS.

I like how you completely skirted round my point that pages with no links or pagerank feature on Googles front page often.

ThePath wrote:I like how you completely skirted round my point that pages with no links or pagerank feature on Googles front page often.

forget about pagerank.

You are completely correct that a page with no link, or more specifically in the context of the thread, a URI that is never used as a link, will not be in the Google index. I didn't skirt around it - it is an important point and I tip my hat to you for making it - but in the context of the discussion we are talking about URIs that are in use and discoverable by a crawler.

Great, another post from the google webmaster blog today about duplicate content issues:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... -your.html

Quoting (emphasis mine):

Having duplicate content on your website is generally not problematic, though it can make it harder for search engines to crawl and index the content. Also, PageRank and similar information found via incoming links can get diffused across pages we aren't currently recognizing as duplicates, potentially making your preferred version of the page rank lower in Google.

Let's not argue about duplicate content being a non-issue anymore, ok?

Daniel are you reading, or interested in this discussion anymore?

Would it be possible to address this issue in a future OpenCart release?