Duplicate Meta Page Titles and Descriptions

[David]

How can I stop/change duplicate meta titles and descriptions when ShopSite generates/pagination product pages? Google hold this against a site, so it makes it much harder to rank on highly on competetive keywords. This is most important on the first page that is used as the landing page not to be duplicated. If we manually rewrite the page meta info, as soon as we publish the site again it rewrites everything back to duplicate info.

Thank you,

David

[Jim]

You can't just modify the html that ShopSite generates because the next time the store is published your edited file will be over written.

If you don't want the meta data, edit the template and remove the template tags that are out putting it. It would probably be something like this

Code: Select all

[-- IF PAGE.MetaKeywords --]
<meta name="keywords" content="[-- PAGE.MetaKeywords --]">
[-- ELSE --]
<meta name="keywords" content="[-- PAGE.Name REMOVE_HTML --]">
[-- END_IF --]
[-- IF PAGE.MetaDescription --]
<meta name="description" content="[-- PAGE.MetaDescription --]">
[-- ELSE --]
<meta name="description" content="[-- PAGE.Name REMOVE_HTML --]">
[-- END_IF --]

If you only want it on the first page of the pagination pages then you could do something like this
[code]
[-- IF PAGE.PaginatedPageNum EQ 0 --]
# we need to output the meta data
[-- IF PAGE.MetaKeywords --]
<meta name="keywords" content="[-- PAGE.MetaKeywords --]">
[-- ELSE --]
# no meta keywords
[-- END_IF --]
[-- IF PAGE.MetaDescription --]
<meta name="description" content="[-- PAGE.MetaDescription --]">
[-- ELSE --]
# no meta description
[-- END_IF --]
[-- ELSE --]
# no meta data output.
[-- END_IF --]
/code]
I haven't actually tried that but it should be something similar to that. NOTE: (Will only work in ShopSite 11 or later since the EQ statement and Page.PaginatedPageNum were added in ShopSite 11.)

[ShopSite Lauren]

What we do in newer versions of ShopSite in the templates is add the pagination page number to the title (and keywords and description if you'd like) so that they are not exactly the same. For example, you can add the following tags to the end of your page titles, meta keywords and meta descriptions.

[-- IF PAGE.PaginatedPageNum NE 0 --] | Page [-- PAGE.PaginatedPageNum --] of [-- PAGE.PaginatedPageNumMax --][-- END_IF --]

The result would look like:

<title>[-- PAGE.Title --][-- IF PAGE.PaginatedPageNum NE 0 --] | Page [-- PAGE.PaginatedPageNum --] of [-- PAGE.PaginatedPageNumMax --][-- END_IF --]</title>

[David]

Hi lauren,

Will this work in the version of Shopsite our host company has? Version: ShopSite® Pro 10 r7.4

Thanks for the help,

David

[ShopSite Lauren]

No, those tags were added in version 11.

[David]

Hi,

Is there a way to automatically create a view all link? (Example: Pagination pages listed at bottom of the page - 1 2 3 4 5 view all)
I think this could help with the duplicate content issue.

Thanks,

David

[Jim]

Since ShopSite generates static html pages there is no way to create a link for "show all" unless you create a duplicate page with all products assigned to it and you disable the pagination on that page. You could then put a link to that page in the footer of the pagination pages as "Show All".

Note that search results pages are generated dynamically so with search pages it is possible to change the sort order, number displayed etc.