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
-
Duplicate Content
Let's say a blog is publishing original content. Now let's say a second blog steals that original content via bot and publishes it as it's own. Now further assume the original blog doesn't notice this for several years. How much damage could this do to blog A for Google results? Any opinions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CYNOT0 -
4000 new duplicate products on our ecommerce site, potential impact?
Hello, We've currently got 9500 products live on our site at the moment with ~2000 in this category that we're adding the new products in. All of these products we're adding are coming from a site that we own and we're trying to expand the range on our site (the 9500 product site has a lot more visitors than the 4000 product site). However, all these products imported I believe are atleast duplicates from the 4000 product site, but the first ones I have seen (500) are manufacturer duplicates. What issues are we potentially going to run in to? Just for extra information: We have no control over canonical/noindex/robots etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Is it best to have products and reviews on the same URL?
Hi Moz, Is it better to have products and reviews on the same or different URLs? I suspect that combining these into one page will help with rankings overall even though some ranking for product review terms may suffer. This is for a hair products company with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of reviews. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Do these results indicate a problem with my seo?
I've entered my the following search query into Google.co.uk related:mywebsite.co.uk However the resulting website that are brought back are on the whole nothing like our website, nor do they offer similar services to us. If I run this same query on my competitors websites they all bring back similar websites to each other. I read somewhere that gaining links from the websites that Google believes are similar/related to our own website is beneficial. But looking at our results it would seem that Google can't place what our site is about and which sites are similar. So I'm guessing this is a more pressing matter than link building right now!? Other info about our website: We rank fairly well for a lot of our target keywords.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adamlcasey
Domain age = 11 years
PA =38
mR= 4.77
mT= 5.74
DA:= 31
DmR= 3.78
DmT= 3.84
PageRank = 3 Example of how random the results are the 1st website that comes back in our related websites search is for Doctors GP Practice. Our website sells GPS Telematics Solutions. Can anyone shed any light on this or just to confirm how much of a problem this is?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 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0 -
E Commerce Blogging
I have an E commerce site that I want to boost search rank for. I had taken some else's advice and created a wp blog on a different url then created content around the products we offer and linked back to the main site using the specific keyword in anchor text. I just joined seomoz earlier this month. It seems like the main consensus here as far to install the blog in the domain.com/blog and I just did that. So now when I create content for that blog should I just link back to the specific categories and or products then? Should I be aware of duplicate content issues? So if the product is widgets and I am talking about widgets in the blog, or blog title, could they be competing or helping the main URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yevgeny0