Website duplicate content and SEO

Shopify Discussion
,

Topic summary

A Shopify store owner reports no SEO improvement and suspects “duplicate content” caused by their navigation: separate menus for Girls, Boys, Babies, plus a main “Shop by Category,” all listing largely overlapping products.

A screenshot (menu layout) is provided to illustrate how multiple paths lead to similar collections/products, creating many internal links and URLs.

They ask:

  • Does this menu structure create harmful duplicate content (same/similar pages across multiple URLs) and hurt rankings?
  • Is having many internal links in e‑commerce navigation a bad practice?
  • Should they remove gender/age menus, keep only “Shop by Category,” and redirect (likely 301) all other links?

They share the site (theplanetjunior.com) and request an expert review to confirm whether these menu items, beyond the main drop‑down, produce duplicate content and whether consolidating/redirecting would improve SEO.

No answers or consensus yet; the thread is open with no actions taken.

Key open questions: best practice for category architecture to avoid duplicate URLs, whether consolidation and redirects would boost rankings, and how to balance user-friendly navigation with SEO.

Summarized with AI on February 6. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hi! I have done SEO of my website but saw no results and that was very frustrating. I think maybe that is because of so much duplicate content. See:

planetjuniorseo_0-1666790361225.png
planetjuniorseo_0-1666790361225.png1175×456 56.5 KB

I have a menu like this for girls, boys, and babies, and then comes the main shop by category menu. The products are almost the same but I did this to make my site user-friendly as you can see, there are age groups specified in the menu.

This creates a lot of links for my site hence, duplicate content. Can anyone guide me is this causing no rankings and failed SEO attempts and is this a good practice to have so many links for an e-commerce site?

Should I remove these links and keep only the shop by category menu and redirect all of the links remaining?

2

My store is theplanetjunior.com. can you go there and check like if these menu items are causing the duplicate content aprt from the main shop by category drop-down? Will they impact my SEO efforts as I am already seeing no improvement in rankings and I think that is the reason.

I just need expert advice as I intend to redirect all the links from the menu and only keep the shop by category menu? Will it be worth it and will my SEO improve?