Duplicate content Issue

[jozacg]

I posted this at the general discussion, i realized that's not the right place to submit it.

It just came to my knowledge that prestashop creates two pages for each of my products. One link will be with the category page in it one without.

For example –

http://www.sextoysingapore.com/tenga-sex-toys-for-men/89-tenga-flip-hole-masturbator.html
http://www.sextoysingapore.com/89-tenga-flip-hole-masturbator.html

The above two links point to two different pages, but the same product.

I never realized there were two pages being created until it showed up in my google webmaster tools that there was duplicate content. And they were notifying me of a product page with and without the category in the link structure.

I believe its applicable to all prestashops as even the presta-store has this situation

http://www.prestastore.com/templates-prestashop/852-book-store.html
http://www.prestastore.com/852-book-store.html

Both serves the same page. It is a case of duplicate content and it will affect our search rankings.
Its not possible for me to do url redirection.

Have you guys noticed this issue? Is there anyway to fix it? Is there some module for it?

[jozacg]

thought this was a serious issue

[bartman]

there is module here

http://www.prestashop.com/forums/viewthread/39736/job_offers_and_services/module_duplicate_url_redirect__redirect_all_duplicate_and_non_seo_friendly_urls_to_the_default_friendly_url

do not know if it will cure the problem

[jozacg]

thanks for the heads up =)

[Gregory Roussac]

Actually if you configure the default category above the categories tree foreach product, no product url should be without the category in it.

But for compatibilty purpose for those who don't define defautl category, the htaccess is configure to point to the product.

isn't it ?

[jozacg]

How do one edit so that the ht access only points to the one with or without the category instead of both.

Id rather have without the category in the url so the product page is closer to the root folder and better when seo is considered.

[Gregory Roussac]

.htaccess redirects to php, it does not make a link in your page.

If you want to withdraw the category, you will have to modify many part of the code and templates.

You should better consider to set a default cat, Look at wordpress permalink, having a category in url is not perturbing SEO.

[jozacg]

How do i htaccess redirect to php?

[vietnam]

And i see that prestashop work with the original url and the order-by . I don`t know if normaly it`s does that, because i have the filter express plugin

http://www.mobila-online.biz/14-sisteme-de-glisare-usi-de-interior?n=10&orderby=price&orderway=desc&id_category=14
http://www.mobila-online.biz/14-sisteme-de-glisare-usi-de-interior?n=50&id_category=14
http://www.mobila-online.biz/14-sisteme-de-glisare-usi-de-interior?orderby=price&orderway=asc

[tomerg3]

And i see that prestashop work with the original url and the order-by . I don`t know if normaly it`s does that, because i have the filter express plugin

http://www.mobila-online.biz/14-sisteme-de-glisare-usi-de-interior?n=10&orderby=price&orderway=desc&id_category=14
http://www.mobila-online.biz/14-sisteme-de-glisare-usi-de-interior?n=50&id_category=14
http://www.mobila-online.biz/14-sisteme-de-glisare-usi-de-interior?orderby=price&orderway=asc

Check out http://www.presto-changeo.com/content/6-prestashopseotips for tips on how to fix the duplicate title + meta-description for these pages.

[x3n0m0rph]

@tomerg3
Not working dude..
I still have errors on webmaster tools.. after 2 months since fix

Plante decorative pentru birou ( 21 quantity desc )
/10-plante-pentru-birou?n=21&orderby=quantity&orderway=desc&id_category=10
/10-plante-pentru-birou?n=21&orderby=quantity&orderway=desc

907 duplicate meta..

[tomerg3]

It works, but Prestashop creates a lot of extra pages (due to extra variables).

I am currently testing some changes that should take care of all (I hope) the duplicate pages that are caused by pagination / sort order / language change.

[chineseboy]

Is there no way to use 301 redirects to avoid the duplicate content issue?

[Trip]

Hi there,
I heavily modified my shop to address some of the above problems.

First consideration was to link every time to
the product page without the category. This is only a little modification in one core file. As I have some products in more than one category that seemed logical to me.

As I have a mulitlingual webseite I also made a module to redirect and rewrite the multilingual urls as if there was a design error concerning the cookie driven language switching. I think there is a fix now in the new version.

Than I rewrote the language block to display the titles in the anchor tag to improve link inheritance and pagerank flow.

After all I think the impact on seo concerning i18n made a little difference but not as much as expected. From my experience most visitors come to my startpage and to the category pages and these are the pages where I have top positions in google. Also I eliminated a lot of dupliclate contend I did not boost my page 100% up. Many people get in panic with there duplicate content issues. From my point of view it is good to keep an eye on it but it is much overrated.
I think google gives a hint that there might be a problem. For example you misconfigured your cms and have a lot of pages with the same title but different content than you seriously loose power.

When you have 2 product pages with the same content I doubt that google punishes you for that. It is simply that google wants to show that there might be a problem and if you want a specific product page to be displayed first, you should give it a unique title.... otherwise google will fetch one which it "thinks" to fit the best.

I have never heard that I can improve the SEO of my site by publishing the same content 1000000 times so where is the advantage of doing it or why should google penalize this?

My 2 cents, trip
To clarify and improve my thoughts I started a new thread here.
http://www.prestashop.com/forums/viewthread/73753/seo_search_engine_optimization/what_is_duplicate_content_questions_and_answers/