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When optimising some e-commerce sites, it can be quite easy to miss a lot of duplicate pages. The nature of e-commerce sites means that they are more complex, with different ways of getting to products via categories or direct searches.

So there are naturally a lot of ways of getting to the same product, often via different URLs. The easiest way of identifying a potential problem would be to copy out a slice of text from a product description and search for it in Google, combining it with a “site:” command to make sure is on the same site:

Site:www.myOnlineShop.co.uk “This great value widget is great for use on water or land”

This search would return all the pages with that description on a site (make sure you click to include omitted search results at the bottom of the search results page). Make a note of the URLs and do a bit of research into how Google is getting to that URL; which link on your site it is following and if there are other products with the same issue.

So how can you fix these issues once you have found them?
First off, find the URL you want to keep in Google’s index. It’s best for optimisation purposes to think what the most friendly version of the URL is. URLs that contain variables, session IDs or search terms are much less useful to Google than one that details the product (categories, product name etc). Once you have chosen the URL, the basic idea is to “nofollow” the other versions of a page, either by meta data or in a link. That way, you can ensure that there is only one version of any particular product in your listings.

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer

There’s a lot of shoddy writing on the internet. You don’t have to be a bestselling author to publish something on the web.

There are some who’d say that great swathes of poorly-written content lower the reader’s standards as to what is deemed acceptable, but I’d disagree. Whatever you write reflects on your business. If you produce content that is littered with spelling mistakes, poor grammar and typos, this says to me that your company is careless and inattentive to detail.

You might be thinking that I would say that because I’m an editor. That’s true to an extent, but I’d counter by saying that the fact that I’m an editor makes me well placed to judge such a thing.

Quite often I see websites littered with spelling mistakes and only last night I saw a Sky Sports advert which used an apostrophe to indicate a plural. I spot these things. If your content meets my standards, it’s generally going to seem acceptable and professional to most people. If English isn’t your strong point, it’s not good enough producing content that meets only your standards. Other people will see the errors that you don’t.

If you’re producing content for the homepage of your business, you’ll want the text to be as close to perfect as possible. If you’re writing a jokey, informal blog, you might be able to get away with a bit more, but I’d still say that the better your standard of written English, the better it will reflect on you and your business.

Alex Bowden
Writer/editor