Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Problems with ecommerce filters causing duplicate content.

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Problems with ecommerce filters causing duplicate content.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    4
    1352
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Silkstream
      Silkstream last edited by

      We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site.

      We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this?

      We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue;

      1. adding "no index" to all filtered pages

      2. making the filters uncrawble using javascript

      Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Silkstream
        Silkstream last edited by

        Thank you both Lesley & Jim!

        This tool is exactly what we needed! Fingers crossed now we have resolved the issues we had with all that duplicate content.

        How long has the parameter tool been available?? I never even knew it existed!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • JMagary
          JMagary last edited by

          Check your Google Webmaster Tools and see if you need to use the Parameter tool.  There are settings there that you can use to tell google not to index parameters.  You can also confirm that Google is not under-indexing your site, in which case you don't have to worry about the parametered URLs at all. If you have canonical tags in place that will do the trick.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • LesleyPaone
            LesleyPaone last edited by

            This might help.

            http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/08/configuring-url-parameters-in-webmaster.html

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            Browse Questions

            Explore more categories

            • Moz Tools

              Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

            • SEO Tactics

              Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

            • Community

              Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

            • Digital Marketing

              Chat about tactics outside of SEO

            • Research & Trends

              Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

            • Support

              Connect on product support and feature requests.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • GhillC

              Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content

              Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
              site.com/us/
              site.com/gb/
              site.com/fr/
              site.com/it/
              etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
              Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
              Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
              1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
              2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
              3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
              Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
              Ghill

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
              0
            • cinzia09

              Same product in different categories and duplicate content issues

              Hi,I have some questions related to duplicate content on e-commerce websites. 1)If a single product goes to multiple categories (eg. A black elegant dress could be listed in two categories like "black dresses" and "elegant dresses") is it considered duplicate content even if the product url is unique? e.g www.website.com/black-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/elegant-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/black-elegant-dress unique url > this is the way my products urls look like Does google perceive this as duplicated content? The path to the content is only one, so it shouldn't be seen as duplicated content, though the product is repeated in different categories.This is the most important concern I actually have. It is a small thing but if I set this wrong all website would be affected and thus penalised, so I need to know how I can handle it. 2- I am using wordpress + woocommerce. The website is built with categories and subcategories. When I create a product in the product page backend is it advisable to select  just the lowest subcategory or is it better to select both main category and subcategory in which the product belongs? I usually select the subcategory alone.  Looking forward to your reply and suggestions. thanks

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cinzia09
              1
            • iQi

              Duplicate content on recruitment website

              Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi
              0
            • adhunna

              Duplicate Titles caused by multiple variations of same URL

              Hi. Can you please advise how I can overcome this issue. moz.rainyclouds.online crawle is indicating I have 100's of Duplicate Title tag errors. However this is caused because many URL's have been indexed multiple times in Google. For example. www.abc.com
              www.abc.com/?b=123 www.abc.com/ www.abc.com/?b=654 www.abc.com/?b=875 www.abc.com/index.html What can I do to stop this issue being reported as duplictae Titles, as well as content? I was thinking maybe I can use Robots.txt to block various query string parameters. I'm Open to ideas and examples.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adhunna
              0
            • team_tic

              International SEO - cannibalisation and duplicate content

              Hello all, I look after (in house) 3 domains for one niche travel business across three TLDs: .com .com.au and co.uk and a fourth domain on a co.nz TLD which was recently removed from Googles index. Symptoms: For the past 12 months we have been experiencing canibalisation in the SERPs (namely .com.au being rendered in .com) and Panda related ranking devaluations between our .com site and com.au site. Around 12 months ago the .com TLD was hit hard (80% drop in target KWs) by Panda (probably) and we began to action the below changes. Around 6 weeks ago our .com TLD saw big overnight increases in rankings (to date a 70% averaged increase). However, almost to the same percentage we saw in the .com TLD we suffered significant  drops in our .com.au rankings. Basically Google seemed to switch its attention from .com TLD to the .com.au TLD. Note: Each TLD is over 6 years old, we've never proactively gone after links (Penguin) and have always aimed for quality in an often spammy industry. **Have done: ** Adding HREF LANG markup to all pages on all domain Each TLD uses local vernacular e.g for the .com site is American Each TLD has pricing in the regional currency Each TLD has details of the respective local offices, the copy references the lacation, we have significant press coverage in each country like The Guardian for our .co.uk site and Sydney Morning Herlad for our Australia site Targeting each site to its respective market in WMT Each TLDs core-pages (within 3 clicks of the primary nav) are 100% unique We're continuing to re-write and publish unique content to each TLD on a weekly basis As the .co.nz site drove such little traffic re-wrting we added no-idex and the TLD has almost compelte dissapread (16% of pages remain) from the SERPs. XML sitemaps Google + profile for each TLD **Have not done: ** Hosted each TLD on a local server Around 600 pages per TLD are duplicated across all TLDs (roughly 50% of all content). These are way down the IA but still duplicated. Images/video sources from local servers Added address and contact details using SCHEMA markup Any help, advice or just validation on this subject would be appreciated! Kian

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team_tic
              1
            • deskstudio

              How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content

              I've  attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section. Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com. Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages. I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now  I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up. This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me. I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deskstudio
              0
            • YNWA

              Duplicate Content on Press Release?

              Hi, We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc... We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site. My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok? We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not. So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics. Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs? Cheers

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA
              0
            • CarlS

              Capitals in url creates duplicate content?

              Hey Guys, I had a quick look around however I couldn't find a specific answer to this. Currently, the SEOmoz tools come back and show a heap of duplicate content on my site. And there's a fair bit of it. However, a heap of those errors are relating to random capitals in the urls. for example. "www.website.com.au/Home/information/Stuff" is being treated as duplicate content of "www.website.com.au/home/information/stuff" (Note the difference in capitals). Anyone have any recommendations as to how to fix this server side(keeping in mind it's not practical or possible to fix all of these links) or to tell Google to ignore the capitalisation? Any help is greatly appreciated. LM.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlS
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.