Duplicate Content and Canonical Tags For eCommerce

Search engines despise duplicate contentDuplicate content is content that appears more than once across a single website. Duplicate content can be a sign of poor resource management, low trust, or a lack of quality control.. Why? Well, having multiple pages with the same content makes it a lot harder for Google bots to crawl through your website and index the various pages.

In fact, Google hates this issue so much that you could suffer from a duplicate content penalty if you’re found guilty.

Google is a super smart search engine, but even it can be confused if numerous URLs within your website have the same content. To stop things from getting too complicated, Google will just index one of the various similar pages you have and ignore the others, negatively affecting your SEO depending on the situation.

You may be thinking that this isn’t a huge issue for you. All your posts and products are unique, so there’s no chance of having duplicate content, right? Actually, no.

In truth, your domain likely has various instances of Google duplicate content, especially if you’re an e-commerce business. There are various legitimate reasons why duplicate content can be generated, and in some cases, you can’t avoid it. The inevitability of duplicate content means that you need to be aware of how they come about and how to manage them with the right duplicate content SEO tactics.

If you’re worried about a different form of duplicate content, you can solve that issue by diversifying your content writing with an external agency like us. With this, you’ll ensure that all your content is unique and bespoke.

What is duplicate content, and how is it generated?

In short, duplicate content is any content on the web that appears on more than one webpage, or more specifically, on more than one distinct URL.

What needs to be understood is that one piece of content can generate multiple different URLs to get to that page. For example, a website’s homepage can have at least 4 pieces of duplicate content right off the bat.

It can have a shorthand URL:

homepage.com

It can have a long-form URL with the ‘WWW.’ included:

www.homepage.com

It can have different versions depending on the device you’re using to access it, such as on mobile:

https://m.homepage.com

https://amp.homepage.com

Plus, it can also have a tracking tag added to it so that digital marketers know where the link was accessed from:

https://homepage?ref=facebook

That’s not even all of them. If you’re an e-commerce website, you could end up with countless more different URLs for a single product, simply because there might be different parameters for it.

For example, if you sell t-shirts, a slightly different URL will be generated for every size or alternative color available for the same product. This could leave you with literally thousands of extra, unwanted duplicate URLs on your website, which will no doubt be harming your SEO.

This issue can be bad for a couple of reasons:

1. The first is that these pages, which are essentially the same as each other, will be competing against each other for ranking. This significantly weakens the SEO of these pages, making them less effective and less likely to appear on search results.
2. The second issue is that if your page does rank on the search result, the URL displayed might not be the one you want to use. This might happen because Google chooses to index a duplicate page. The problem with this is that if it displays a particularly ugly-looking URL such as ‘https://homepage.com/index.php?id=2’, some users might be put off from using your page going with a website with a neater URL instead.

Thankfully, if you’ve found yourself floundering with masses of duplicate content, there’s a simple duplicate content SEO tactic you can use to ensure that your website is well organized. This is where Canonical Tags come into play.

How Canonical Tags Can Help

Canonical tags are the best way to deal with Google duplicate content. They don’t remove the duplicates entirely (you wouldn’t want that to happen anyway), but they do make it where they’re treated as if they’re invisible.

A canonical tagThe canonical tag is used to designate a single page as the original page, or the page that should be indexed by search engines. is a small snippet of HTML code used to inform Google crawlers what the main version of a webpage is. Google will then take this information and only index this specified page, ignoring the other pages so that they don’t interfere with your SEO.

It’s important to note that canonical tags are not the same thing as canonical URLs.

• Tags: The pieces of code found in the head section of HTML.
• Canonical URLs: The web addresses chosen as the master page.

These phrases should never be used interchangeably as despite them being closely related, they are not the same thing.

Canonical tags are placed within the <head> section of a webpage and look like this: rel=” canonical”

Next to this tag, you’ll add the URL address of your desired main page that you want to be indexed. Adding this code may look tricky to inexperienced people, but you can’t go wrong if you follow the same syntax every time.

For example, out of the previous homepage URLs mentioned above, if you want to make www.homepage.com your main page, the entire piece of code will look like this:

<link rel=” canonical” href=” www.homepage.com/”/>

This bit of code basically states to search engines that the link in this tag is the master version and can be found on the attached URL.

Adding canonical tags to your content is a great thing to do, as now, all your duplicate content SEO efforts will be consolidated into one main page. Suppose one duplicate page generates a backlink and another gets shared on an authority article. In that case, all of that SEO goodness will instead be attributed to the main page, making it stronger and more likely to rank on search engines.

Additionally, canonical tags also make it so much easier for e-commerce store owners to analyze the performance of their products. If multiple URLs are going to the same page, it can disrupt the data that your analysis software gets as it would have been pulled from multiple sources. Adding a canonical tag means that there’s only one source, keeping things organized.

A final benefit of adding canonical tags to your pages is that it stops Google from wasting time crawling pointless, duplicate pages. Each domain on the internet gets given a ‘crawl budgetA crawl budget is how often the search engine crawls your website and how much time they spend on your site.,’ which is effectively the time a crawler will spend indexing your pages before moving on. If it is spent wasting too much time on multiple pages that are the same, it might miss other pages that could be boosting your SEO and performance.

Adding Canonical Tags Properly

When adding canonical tags to your content, you need to know a few best practices to ensure quality and that nothing goes wrong. The main thing is that you need to only specify one URL per page. If you add more, you’ll simply confuse things, and it’s not going to work.

Furthermore, you should also specify the correct domain protocol. For example, if your website runs on the HTTPS protocol, make sure to reference this. You also want to write the entire URL that includes your domain and not just the extension. Doing so will ensure that crawlers interpret the code correctly.

Other Ways To Specify Canonical Pages

As well as adding canonical tags to your HTML, there are also other ways to specify canonical pages to avoid a duplicate content penalty. These are through:

301 redirectsA redirect is a web page that loads in place of another web page.

301 redirects are status codes that tell search engines that you want to create a permanent link from one URL to another one. If you want to remove Google duplicate content and disregard it, this is a good option as it ensures that the page you’re placing the redirect on is completely forgotten about.

This tactic is great if a duplicate page is old and has outdated information or if the product that it displays doesn’t exist anymore. 301 redirects are also far more forceful ways of setting canonical pages. It is a command to Google that it must follow instead of a suggestion that can be ignored, which is the case for canonical tags.

Your XML sitemapA site map is a list of pages on your site and their relative importance. Use sitemaps to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for, and to ensure that search engines can find all the information they need.

Your sitemap is a list of all the URLs that you want the search bots to crawl, so if you build it effectively and only include your main master pages on it, it should help you avoid having duplicate content indexed.

The problem is that it’s very hard for website builders to keep their sitemaps fully clean and perfect, as noncanonical pages can easily be missed. That’s why doing this, as well as setting canonical tags on your duplicate pages, is recommended, as it makes it more likely that you’ll eliminate each duplicate page from affecting your ranking.

HTTP headersHTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) headers contain metadata about the object you're retrieving from a server. for PDFs

PDFs and other attachments like those that feature on a web page can create duplicate content when they’re opened. For example, if you have a PDF version of a blog post, that will be considered duplicate content and could run the risk of ranking and appearing on search results instead of your main page, which is not what you want.

Annoyingly, as a PDF isn’t a webpage, there’s no way to add a canonical tag in the <head> section because it doesn’t exist. Instead, you’ll have to use an HTTP header to set canonicals, which are similar but follow a slightly different syntax.

Adding Canonical Tags On The Main E-Commerce Platforms

Adding your own canonical tags on the various e-commerce platforms available to you will be slightly different from each other, simply due to how the software and UI are built. Thankfully, none are too hard to do at all and just require following a few steps.

Here’s some brief information on setting up canonical tags on the two leading e-commerce platforms that you’re likely to use.

Magento:

Magento allows its users to set canonical tags as their product page name by default, meaning that category pages will be ignored. The user will need to log into the website and go to the configuration settings, which is the last option on the system tab.

From there, you then need to go to the catalog menu and then click on the search engine optimization settings. Here there will be various yes/no parameters that you can turn on and off. For the instruction ‘Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products,’ you want to ensure that it is turned to ‘yes.’

If you need to do anything more specific, you can also manually set canonical tags bespoke for each page. To do this, you’ll first have to select the category page you want to add a canonical tag to.

Following that, you need to click on the Custom Design Tab, navigate that menu and end up on the Custom Layout Update box for your category page.

In that box, you need to add some code that removes the current self-referencing canonical tag, and then under that, add more code that details what you’re replacing it with.

The entire sequence of code should look like the following, with the URL of the page you’re replacing and the replacement URL being specific to you.

<reference name=” head”>
<action method=”removeItem”>
<type>link_rel</type>
<name>https://www.homepage.com /product1?SizeMBlue</name>
</action>
<action method=”addLinkRel”>
<rel>canonical</rel>
<href>https://www.homepage.com/product1</href>
</action>
</reference>

Shopify:

Shopify makes things slightly easier for their customers because they add self-referencing canonical URLs for all their products and blog posts by default, removing much of the need to do them yourself.

However, you still might want to edit the canonical URLs. To do this, you’ll need to directly edit the template files (labeled as .liquid), which is pretty simple.

Unfortunately, due to the way Shopify manages its content, you cannot specify custom canonicals as you can with Magento.

What you can do is open your themes liquid files and seek out the following code:

{{ product.url | within: collection }}

To ensure that both your canonical tags and internal linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. are correct, you simply need to remove the ‘within: collection’ part of this code, leaving you with:

{{ product.url }}

This should eliminate any internal links from pointing to duplicate versions instead of the main page.

Conclusion

Duplicate content can really mess up the SEO of your e-commerce website, but unfortunately, it’s unavoidable; an e-commerce website is just going to generate duplicate and similar content naturally.

By using canonical tags and adding them into the head sections of your web pages’ HTML properly, you should be able to ensure that they’re not an issue and will just be ignored and left alone by Google crawlers.

All of this can be a little confusing to get your head around. If you keep it simple and follow the best practices, you’ll soon find your e-commerce website flourishing and benefiting from this on-page duplicate content SEO technique that keeps your website clean and more organized.