Duplicity Problems - What to do with similar products in e-commerce?
-
Hello,
I have an eCommerce website with hundreds of similar products. On some occasions, besides for their measurements they are completely identical.
The titles are kept different by using the stock reference and the meta descriptions also use their measurements.
However, I'm gettingDuplicate Page Content errors by the MOZ crawler.
This is more than understandable since the products are very similar -
WHAT SHOULD I DO???I noticed a similar situation in BlueNile (the diamond ecommerce site) - They have numerous almost identical pages, see example:
http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02424873
http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02430168
For some reason, they did on each page a canonical to it's self...
I wanted to add...
It is impossible to add different descriptive texts due to the amount of products and to the rapidness they are sold (each product is unique - similar to the diamonds in the BlueNile example).
-
Dear Cyrus,
I completely agree that there is no good and added value with the stock id and measurements for Google but I felt like I had no choice.
I didn't want to start putting canonical between the pages because every other day an item is sold and then I would need to change the canonical to a similar existing item.
Are you saying that when a page makes a canonical to himself Google does not index it? Or treats it as a non original page (a copied page) even if I don't specify from where it is copied?
Please see the following question I asked that is about this matter and got a different response: http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-there-a-reason-to-put-a-canonical-to-yourself-interesting-case
Thanks
-
First, let me explain the SEOmoz duplicate content errors. These are issued anytime the HTML of a page is 95% similar to another page (this means the entire code, not just the text). It sounds like this is what is happening in your case.
Blue Nile solves this dilemma with the canonical tag. They are basically telling the search engines to consolidate all the pages into one for ranking purposes. The downside of this is that any page that doesn't point to itself isn't going to rank.
You stated that each title and description are differentiated using the "stock reference" and "measurements." The big question is... are these important for ranking? By this I mean do your customers search Google for your products by stock number and/or measurements?
If it were me, and without knowing more about your situation, I would try to consolidate your product pages as much as possible and use the canonical tag, similar to Blue Nile, on near-duplicate pages (strictly speaking, Google states the canonical tag is only for exact duplicates, but in the real world they are more flexible)
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Thanks for the reply but I am unable to create the 40% unique content.
My case is exactly like the BlueNile sample I gave on top...
These are extremely similar products but still each is unique because of slight differences (that are important to the buyers). I have thousands of products and each product is one of a kind - when it is sold - it is removed to the "sold items" section.
There is no way (and no point since each product can be sold once) to write a description to so many products that are constantly changing.
-
Your errors can be incurred for a number of reasons. You need to ensure you have a enough unique content per page, If you only have a few words or character of text related to any particular item and only a few unique words in the Title tag you will be flagged for duplication. Expand unique text where you can and ensure only Primary Brand Keywords are in the Title tag such that each page should have a majority of unique text. If your URLs are dynamic in nature investigate opportunities to make them Human Readable and in a structured format. SEOmoz has written numerous guides on URL structure. Place unique content wherever you can in images files names, alt text etc... Think minimum of 40% content differential per page including the site template. Too many links in a navigation can impact you if you have limited body content on a page.
-
It looks like on those two examples its just the table% and depth % that are different? Any way you could just combine the similar products, and just make it a option to select the different table % and depth%?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Approach for discontinued categories and products
My web site previously offered several categories of an indoor type of product, which have since been permanently discontinued. We do still offer a full line of the outdoor type of these products. The usage is quite different (indoor vs. outdoor), and customers looking for the indoor variety are not likely to be immediately interested in the outdoor ones. But the pages for the discontinued categories and products have built up significant page authority and rank quite well even for more generic searches which are not indoor or outdoor specific. I am interested in opinions on what approach to take for the discontinued category pages and product pages. Currently, the discontinued pages are accessible by direct link, but have been removed from the site's navigation menus and on-site search. The pages include some messaging for visitors to inform that we no longer offer this type of product, with some links to active categories. We can remove these pages and serve a 404 error page. Or, we can redirect these pages to the outdoor product category (but all would have to be redirected to a single category, as the specific outdoor categories and products don't map logically to specific indoor ones). Or, we can keep as-is. I am interested in opinions on approach, either between these options above, or other alternatives.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewk0 -
Too many redirects Homepage Problem
During a site move, a sub domain of website a redirected all pages to the homepage of website b. resulting a homepage algorithmic penalty for website b. The sub domain was deleted - and the sitemove for the main domain went through ok. However website b has 80,000 incoming links from the sub domain of website a. is there anything else that needs to be done to "inform" google that the mistake was fixed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FusionMediaLimited1 -
URL Structure For E-commerce Sites
Hi Guys, I was wondering what would be the optimal and best URL structure for sub-categories on a E-commerce site for SEO purposes. Example if my category was dresses and I had multiple sub-categories within dresses would 1 or 2 below be the better URL structure? 1) Domain + Category + Sub-Category be the most suitable URL structure: Sleeveless Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/dresses/sleeveless-dresses Midi Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/dresses/midi-dresses 2) OR would excluding the category be better Domain + Sub-Category like: Sleeveless Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/sleeveless-dresses Midi Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/midi-dresses Do you think it makes much of a difference, is shorter better and more effective in this case? E.g. Rand discuses in this article: https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls that having the keyword in the URL serves as anchor text, so wouldn't having additional keywords dilute value in this case? Plus he mentions shorter URLs the better. Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright1 -
Galleries and duplicate content
Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!0 -
Migrating e-commerce platform (same domain). Do I need to be concerned about these changes?
We are moving a domain from oscommerce to prestashop.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
We will setup 301 redirects for each page and have made sure that new platform is following SEO best practices. I read a lot that it is critical to keep changes to a minimum when migrating to a new domain, but is this also critical when migrating just to a new e-commerce platform (same domain)? Change of URL is unavoidable, but what about these other changes below? Would you be very concerned about doing them at the same time, or rather would you do them some time after the migration? title tag (about 30% of text in title tag will be different) meta description tag (more customized and varied meta description than before) h1 (expanding product name with some relevant keywords for a number of products) additional table with product features (additional content in product pages) adding additional products to store moving to https instead of http Product descriptions and product images and category descriptions will remain the same. Replicating title tag, title description and h1 from old site would actually imply quite a lot of additional work at this point and we would have to make the change anyway at a later point, so if it is not a major risk I would prefer to do it in one go. Any thoughts?0 -
Duplicate content clarity required
Hi, I have access to a masive resource of journals that we have been given the all clear to use the abstract on our site and link back to the journal. These will be really useful links for our visitors. E.g. http://www.springerlink.com/content/59210832213382K2 Simply, if we copy the abstract and then link back to the journal source will this be treated as duplicate content and damage the site or is the link to the source enough for search engines to realise that we aren't trying anything untoward. Would it help if we added an introduction so in effect we are sort of following the curating content model? We are thinking of linking back internally to a relevant page using a keyword too. Will this approach give any benefit to our site at all or will the content be ignored due to it being duplicate and thus render the internal links useless? Thanks Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayderby0 -
Bridge page problem
Hello I run this website, http://www.bestillkredittkort.no (Norwegian website) I'm working all i can to make it rank, so i wanted to test adwords to see how good the page converted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katal
.
Problem is my page got labeled bridge page. I have read the Google guideline for fixing bridge page and tried to fix what they suggest to make them accept the page, but its not working. I might think there's a underlying problem here, but im not sure how to fix it. I've even seen People from the same niche running adwords campaign with less content on the target page. Last time i tried to recheck if my site would get approved. I ran over the quality score tab. And when it was in pending it showed 10/10 in every aspect. was that just a sample ? I'm realy confused on this one. And im afraid it might be a problem witht the page that can destroy my seo efforts. Anyone have any suggestion or feedback on this one?0 -
Soft 404 problem
I have a soft 404 problem in webmaster tools for http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/feed and I'm not sure why. I read on here that if it is a main content page it should be fixed but I don't know how. I've tried to 301 redirect the page to http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/ but the redirect doesn't appear to be working? how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0