Duplicate Content Problem Solved for VPASP Sites

Duplicate content isn’t a problem for just for VPASP powered sites. It can cause problems for any site and many online catalogs suffer from this problem too. It is a particular problem for online retail sites because they may want to include the same product in several categories to enable their customers to easily find it whilst browsing through categories of interest. This typically means that a site has multiple versions of what is the same page content.

From the search engines perspective (and their users) they only want a single page to come up in their search results and the search engines (unless told otherwise - see below) will select which page they think is the most relevant. This in itself might not be a problem, but losing ‘link juice’ (inbound links from other sites) may well be and that is important when it comes to that product getting good search results for its keywords.

For example, a site has a product page display in several categories as follows:

/products/56-sony-bravia.asp
/shop/shopexd.asp?id=56
etc etc

The problem is that if other sites link in the ‘link juice’ most likely will get spread over several url’s.

Quite often people refer to ‘being penalized’ by the search engines because they have duplicate content. This is un-true. The search engines are simply trying to keep their listings uncluttered.

Fortunately, there are things which can be done to resolve this conundrum. The major search engines now recognise something called canonical urls. This simply allows the site to direct the search engines to a preferred version of the url. In doing so it is that url which will appear in the search engine listings and it will inherit any link juice from any duplicates. This is good news because it means that you can concentrate your SEO efforts on a single page.

Duplicate content can be a real problem for VPASP powered sites including those that use the SEO Pak.

We have a solution...

Product File Management Enhancements (BYZ163)

It gives the VPASP owner complete control over the way product pages are named (which is great for SEO) and you can specify canonical urls! It also cleverly eliminates duplicate content from VPASP’s dynamic pages by using 301 redirects to tell search engines that that dynamic page has now moved and to go look at your preferred page.

You can find out more about other useful VPASP SEO bolt-ons we’ve developed here.