Magento Duplicate Content Issue SEO

Hi Guys, Magento duplicate content issue SEO, anyone out there who came across Magento and it’s layered / filtered navigation and multiple product URLs must know what are we going to talk about today. Yes duplication content issue which causes a lot of pain for site owners because none of the search engines like sites with same content as they refer to as substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

So how do you solve them and what are the solutions out there to fix it? Fortunately there are quite a lot of solutions out there but unfortunately none of them fixes the problem as whole.

So let’s talk about the solutions out there one by one and then we will let you know about our solution which has proven to be quite sucessful among our clients.

Solution 1 -: Canonical Tags

Magento already has built in settings to set this for category and product pages. The settings are in Admin -> System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Search Engine Optimisation.

Solution 2 -: Google webmaster

Google webmaster tool has settings where you can exclude URL parameters i.e. query strings. The settings are in google webmaster -> crawl -> url parameters

Solution 3 -: Adding entries in robots.txt

Robots.txt allows you to allow or disallow search engine bot to look for certain folders and urls

Here is the example which will give some indication

Disallow: /*?dir*
Disallow: /*?dir=desc
Disallow: /*?dir=asc
Disallow: /*?limit=all
Disallow: /*?mode*
Disallow: /*?___from_store=*
Disallow: /*?cat=*
Disallow: /*?q=*

Solution 4 -: Add meta tag in the head with no follow

This solution requires some development but not a lot as it simply adds the following meta tag in the head section of your website as soon as it sees query string symbol i.e. “?” in the URL

<meta name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" />

And there are few more suggestions and recommendations out there but unfortunately they don’t work for all search engines. So we decided to come with something which should solve this problem in a generic way.

And after few months of effort we came back with the solutions. Also implemented the following solutions to our multiple clients and results were outstanding.

If you are interested in our modules then you can buy from our main website using the following URLs -:

Magento SEO Friendly Layered Navigation

Magento SEO Catalog Unique URL

Hope this article helped you in some way. Please leave us your comment and let us know what do you think? Thanks.