Duplicate content issue with ecommerce site?

Hi guys,

I have an issue with a clients site.

They have over 600 products. The problem is that Google has indexed all of their products more than once with different URLs even though I have a rel=canonical tag pointing to the correct product pages.

For example:



Is this a problem since I am using the rel=canonical tag? Is it going to affect the sites rankings?

Ideally I'd only like Google to index the URLs I've specified in the canonical tag.

If this IS a problem, how can I go about fixing it?

Should I just 301 redirect all of these incorrect links Google has indexed?


Cheers!
Aaron

Is anyone able to help me out with this?

Bump, need to get this sorted out

bump and sub'd for more info.

I'm having a very similar situation and have not been able to find any answers to date.

I've chosen to trust that the canonical tag will be sufficient, however more insight on this would be greatly appreciated.

Do you have access to a coding team? If so, you could add the robots directive "follow, noindex" to the pages that you don't want to show.

You could also maybe sort it out in robots.txt using wildcards. For example, block everything in /shop/ and /product/ and that contains *fridge*

You will then need Google to index all the bad pages again. The best way to do this is to Fetch as Google each page in WMT. If there are a lot of pages, you could do a bulk fetch by crawling all links on a page you create, but there seems to be a limit of about 200 links that Google will follow, so you might need to do this in batches. Doing it page by page is time consuming, but seems to work better.

You will then need to redo this work in a month. Pages don't drop immediately. On a client site with similar issues, it took 9 months for all the pages to be requested often enough for Google to realise not to crawl them any longer. Google doesn't deindex the first time around in case you make a mistake. Just like you might index a page, you could also throw social signals at the ones you want to deindex. That seems counter-intuitive, but what you want to do is get Google to visit those pages as often as possible to see that it should drop them.

Hope this helps.

Sorry, in robots.txt, you don't want to block, you want to noindex as well.

Thanks so much for the reply.

Do you think that is necessary though given I am using the rel=canonical tag which points to the correct page?

I suppose my question is, if I do nothing about this, is this going to affect my clients rankings?

Which shopsystem?
Are those sites all accessible?
Are the sites all in the sitemap.xml?
Are the urls in the tags correct absolute or relatives?
Is there only one canonical tag in the pages? (check source)

RightFootFanatic said:

Which shopsystem?
Are those sites all accessible?
Are the sites all in the sitemap.xml?
Are the urls in the tags correct absolute or relatives?
Is there only one canonical tag in the pages? (check source)

Click to expand...

Woocommerce.
If by sites you mean pages, yeah, all of the duplicate URLs are accessible.
The incorrect URLs are not in the sitemap, the correct URLs are in the sitemap.
Not sure what you mean by this question sorry, are you able to explain>
Yep, just one tag.

Thanks!