Is this duplicate content?

I am at the moment doing af little SEO work on a local webshop, where there are a lot of products. We were doing some linkbuilding on 'category' pages. Several of these pages have pictures and text integrated from the product pages. Several of these products are visible on different pages, but they always refer to on single product and not a load of different pages with the same products... Man I didnt explain that well! Well what i mean is these category pages where he integrates his products all refer to an url like this www(dot)example.com/products/12 and not pages like this www(dot)example.com/category1/product12 , www(dot)example.com/category2/product12 and www(dot)example.com/category3/product12 .

So my question is when I have category 1, 2, 3 and actually up to 10-15 different ones. These categories show products directly from the product pages, but products are often occuring in many different categories like 'presents for mother', 'presents for girlfriend' and 'presents for wives'. Will these product placement be considerede duplicate content? If yes: Can it be handled with a canonical fix and how! The system is Magento, any good and cheap add ons for that?

I don't think you would use a canonical tag on a category page normally but if your category pages only show a single product then it might be worth a try. I use wordpress a lot and it has built in categories. I haven't heard of any major issues with it.

Crazydog12,

Typically there is only an issue when you have two (or more) pages with substantially the same content on them. For instance if 80% of the content on two different pages were exactly the same or substantially similar, then search engines would be confused as to which one to show. If you have one or two product descriptions mixed in with dozens of others that are not duplicates, then you should be fine just leaving it alone. If there is substantially the same content on two different pages, you may want to consider redirecting one page to another or removing the duplicate page all together.

So, in a nutshell, having a little content that is the same from page to page is not a big deal. Its when you have an exact copy or when most of the page is the same as another.

Here is a good post on SEOMoz to help you understand,

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Hope that helps,

Shawn

i don't understand why is this being a major issue. i don't think its that big. :/

Hi there - thx for your inputs... Had given up on answers to this post ... thats the reason for the late response - my apologies

Shawn - thx for the link - exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for