E-commerce businesses depend very much on Google rankings which cause SEO audits are a must. If you run a SEO service and discover that it is important to resolve any issues you find, below are three things to be audited when it comes to e-commerce site for SEO.

1. Flush Out Thin or Duplicate Content

Create more content will be good for you, since Google will be happy to point traffic your way however, many writers use this opportunity the wrong way, for example they place similar content on separate pages which will split and weaken your traffic to individual pages. Besides, be careful on creating too much duplicate content decreases a site’s overall SEO. Duplicate content also puts you at risk of an algorithm penalty, which is some of the hardest SEO trouble spots to fix because you won’t get notified. So you better avoid having any difficult content to get better SEO rank by following the things below:

• Product descriptions should always be your own. Never use the manufacturer’s lifeless, repetitive descriptions.
• Use robots.txt to seal off any repetitive areas of a page, like headers and footers, so they don’t get crawled.
• Use canonical tags to prevent accidental duplication.

2. Use Canonical Tags

Sometimes, there might be some addresses that direct to the same page, so to avoid this thing, Google use Canonical tags to tell which parts of a website are “canonical” – a permanent part of the site. Two things happen when multiple routes to a page create multiple URLs that all point to the same page. First, Google sees them as different pages and splits traffic between them, and your page authority nosedives. Second, each page will be indexed by Google as a duplicate. The best solution is to use canonical tags, so that Google will ignore those pages, rather than indexing them and flagging your site for duplication.

However, Google will count your URL as unique due to their different URLs, furthermore traffic will be split four ways even though each page is the same. Moreover, Google will sort out the amount of visitor that each page will get, for example, a page that gets 1000 visitors shows up in Google’s algorithm as receiving 250, while the “other three pages” get the additional traffic.

3. Paginate Categories

Pagination issues can be found even in smaller e-commerce sites. In fact, pagination is a two-edged sword. For instance, if you’re going to have site that anyone can find their way around, pagination is a must, but on the other hand pagination can confuse Google, since it is quite close with duplicate content issues, from paginated and view-all versions of the same page; backlinks and other ranking signals can be spread out among paginations, diluting their effects. Additionally, in very large categories, crawl depth can be an issue to.

You can use canonical tags to identify the view-all pages as the “real” one for indexing purposes which will save you from duplication issues, but there are some shortcomings to this approach. Multi product categories and search results won’t have view-all pages due to the large size requirement, so you can’t canonicalize in that case. Moreover, you can also use rel=”next” and rel=”prev” HTML markup to differentiate paginated pages; make sure if you do this you don’t canonicalize the first page.