How to Fix Duplicate Content in Magento 2

Duplicate content in Magento 2 is a major culprit behind poor search engine optimization and rankings for many online stores. Don’t want to be the victim of duplicate content? Read this blog post till the end to find out the ways to fix duplicate content in Magento 2.

Magento 2 is a well-known eCommerce platform loved by merchants because of its high flexibility and powerful customization options. Yet, there are some technical pitfalls that generate duplicate content, making it less good for search engine optimization. Quite often, Magento 2 stores generate duplicate pages that create hurdles for marketers to win the SEO game. In this blog post, I am going to cover everything Magento 2 store owners need to know about duplicate content, along with the ways to fix it. 🚀

This Post Contains

• What is Duplicate Content & Why Does it Happen in Magento 2?
• Methods to Fix Duplicate Content in Magento 2
  • Set up 301 Redirects
  • Configure robots.txt Files
  • Canonicalize URLs in Magento 2
  • Run Website Content Audit & Fix Manually
• In the End

What is Duplicate Content & Why Does it Happen in Magento 2?

Duplicate Content is a piece of content that is available at multiple places on the internet, in the same or different domains. Long story short — they are pages with different URLs but the same content.

This makes it difficult for search engines to identify the original one and can badly affect the rankings, leaving the search engines in a state of confusion.

In a study conducted by Raventools, 29% of the crawled pages were found to be affected by duplicate content.

Now, why should you worry about this? Does it affect SEO?

The short answer is YES. Duplicate content does affect search engine optimization.

Search engines such as Google give top priority to content that is fresh and unique. Duplicate content on your website can flash a red signal to search engines. It also eats your crawl budget. There is a high chance that Google will penalize your site with low rankings and lesser visibility on the SERPs due to duplicate content.

But why does duplicate content happen in Magento 2?

Well, there can be multiple reasons.

It can be a manual or technical error. Store owners can use tools such as Siteliner & Copyscape to detect on-site & off-site duplicate content issues. It is advisable to check the content for plagiarism before uploading to avoid duplicate content issues.

Some of the technical causes of duplicate content in Magento 2 are:

1. Duplicate Product Descriptions

A common type of duplicate content issue faced by online stores is product descriptions. Most eCommerce websites make use of product description content provided by the manufacturer. The detailed information provided is used to sell products on multiple online selling websites.

Solution:

• Audit all the product descriptions in your store for duplicate content using Google Search Operators.
• Write unique product descriptions for new and existing products.
• Use plagiarism tools to detect copied content.

2. Sorting, Filtering & URL Parameters

In Magento 2, the ‘sort’ & ‘filter’ options on the category pages add various parameters to the end of the category pages’ URLs. This may not seem like an issue at first glance, but it can turn horrible if we look from the SEO point of view.

The problem is — sometimes, these URLs containing different parameters will be indexed by search engines!

Consider the following URLs for example:

• https://example.com/books/
• https://example.com/books/?product_list_order=name
• https://example.com/books/?product_list_order=popularity
• https://example.com/books/?price=50-100

Magento 2 creates the above URLs when the customers apply sorting & filter options. They all refer to the same category page with the same content with different URLs. This can confuse the search engines to identify the original page leading to poor SEO and deteriorated rankings.

Solution:

• Add self-referential canonical tags to the category pages.
• For example: <link href="https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization" rel="canonical">

3. WWW vs. non-WWW Pages

Another common duplicate content issue that your Magento store may be a victim of is — www & non-www pages.

It is essential to first decide whether you want Google to index the www version of your Magento store or the non-www.

https://example.com/ and https://www.example.com/  these both URLs are perceived as distinct pages by the search engine crawlers and indexed individually. Letting the search engines crawl both versions of the website can lead to a site-wide duplicate content issue.

Solution:

• Redirect www-pages to their non-www versions.
• Add a Noindex tag to the www version of pages.

Methods to Fix Duplicate Content in Magento 2

Now, you know the common duplicate content issues in Magento 2 with workable solutions. Now, let’s see some of the common ways to fix duplicate content in Magento 2.

Set up 301 Redirects

Not the best, but a common way to fix duplicate content in Magento 2 is to set up 301 redirects. This can be helpful in certain situations when a single webpage is accessible using different URLs. For instance, consider you had a web page with the following URL:

https://example.com/new-products-2022

and you changed it to

https://example.com/new-products-2023

But, the old URL is still being crawled and indexed by Google. In such cases, you may need to redirect the old URL to the new one. Thanks to Magento, it allows 301 redirects by default. Follow the steps to create 301 redirects in Magento 2:

• Go to the admin panel.
• Navigate to Marketing > SEO & Search > URL Rewrites.
• Click the Add URL Rewrite button.
• Choose Custom in create URL Redirect dropdown.
• Add the Request & Target path to create a URL redirect in Magento 2

Configure robots.txt File

Another way to combat duplicate content issues in Magento 2 is to direct Google — which pages to index and which not to.

Configuring the robots.txt file in your Magento 2 store can help you allow or disallow the search engine bots to crawl specific pages on your website. This way, you can save your crawl budget and also get rid of duplicate content in Magento 2. Follow the steps below to edit the robots.txt file in Magento 2:

• In the Magento admin, go to Content > Design > Configuration.
• Expand the Search Engine Robots section.
  • Default Robots: Choose either of the options from the drop-down menu.
  • Edit Custom-instruction of Robots.txt file: Enter the custom instructions if required.
  • Reset to Default: Use this button to set Magento 2 Robots.txt file to its default configuration.
• Save the configuration.

Canonicalize URLs in Magento 2

An ideal way to deal with multiple pages containing duplicate content in Magento 2 is to choose the best version and canonicalize other pages to it. This way, you can still keep the other pages crawled and indexed while passing no negative signals to the search engines.

A good practice is to use self-referential canonical tags on all the pages to avoid duplication content issues because of URL parameters (as discussed above). Steps to set up URL canonicalizations in Magento 2:

• Log into your admin panel, and go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization.
• Enable the corresponding options to add self-referential canonical tags to category pages.

Run Website Content Audit & Fix Manually

Last but not least — an important step to ensure your site is free from duplicate content is to regularly run content audits. To content audit your store, you can leverage tools such as Screaming Frog.

Another straightforward way to find if the content on a webpage is published elsewhere or not is through Google Search Operators. Follow the steps:

• Pick up a random sentence from your webpage.
• Go to Google, in the search box, enter the sentence enclosed in double quotes, and hit enter.

This will show all the webpages indexed by Google that contain the specific sentence in their content, including yours. You can also use the site: & - operators to include or exclude results from your website.

Things to do with the duplicate content pages: Edit, remove, redirect, canonicalize, or de-index — the choice is yours!

In the End

Duplicate content is a serious issue for store owners. Finding and fixing the on-site & off-site duplicate content is essential to prevent ranking penalties and stay on the safe side. I hope you’ll find this blog post helpful in fixing duplicate content in Magento 2.

Comment down if you have any queries; I’d be happy to help you. 😇

Also, let me know which tools or strategies you use to combat duplicate content in Magento 2 store. 😀

Thank you for reading. 🍀