Simular product pages
-
I have 27000 products on my website, showed one by one on a separated webpage. Google index them almost all (+- 25000). But the SEOmoz report shows them as duplicated content. Indeed, most of the page is identical, only changing description and price of the product which is indeed not more than 2% of the total content of the page. On the bottom of the product page are shown the alternatives for this product, mainly other colors. So, within the same family of products that can have 50 products, the site creates 50 webpages showing the product and it's family. That's why nearly everything on the page is identical within this family of products.
My guess is, as Google indexed them all, I should not worry about duplicated content.
Is my guess correct?
Thanks for a soon answer.
Rik
-
Are you telling me now that I shouldn't be worried that much about SEOmoz flagging 6000 errors on duplicate content as long as my pages get indexed by Google and my site ranking well?
-
You're right on that count. Google doesn't exactly open-source their algos and share them with everyone. We did just change the way we detect duplicate content, and made a blog post about it yesterday. Fewer false positives should exist regarding duplicate content, but things like this will probably still get flagged.
-
OK, I understand. I saw others doing the same. I only never guessed why they did group products where only the color is a variation. Now you gave me a head-ache as this is a very very major change in my approach if I want to group my products on one page. In case I want to set up canonical for the preferred version, I need to sort out how to do this programmatically as I might have 27000 different product pages, HTML-wise I only have one. But this can't be that hard to find out.
I stay with one doubt, however you might be right. My site is 4 years old and for almost 3 years was on Number One in organic Google in Belgium with a competition of more than 4 million. If Google at one time had considerated my approach of one page per product as duplicate content I never would have get there.
Highly appreciated, your comment as well as the one of donford.
Thanks.
-
I think this is exactly what you are looking for -
http://maileohye.com/seo-tips-for-e-commerce-sites/
And personally what I feel is that these pages will be considered duplicate and therefore, you need to fix them by setting up canonical for the preferred version. Or if there is one standalone page, you need to block other pages/ color variations from search engines. Let me know what you think.
-
The pages you show are (in my eyes) completely different, much more different than the ones I have.
Two samples both indexed where only the color and the price differs. The site ranks well in Google, the pages are showed when entering the product code. The pages itself have very low trust (1).
As the site ranks very well, the pages are indexed and SEOmoz showing duplicate content error, it must be that the used algorithm is different between Google and SEOmoz.
-
It sounds like you're on target if your pages are returning high or well on SERP's. To answer the question about the % of difference that I don't know, I can show you an example using our o-ring pages.
AS001 size orings in 2 different materials
Basically the same information but added some material specific information to each page to help differentiate them in the search engines. Again not sure what % difference that is, but we have no dup content warnings here at SEOmoz.
-
Thanks for your answer and yes it makes sence. However my products shift in brands, every brand has families and every family has product codes. As the product code being the keyword - many visitors are looking for the product using the product code as a keyword - the SE doesn't have any problems to show the right page. If a visitor use the family name or the brand name in a search, my site has specific landing pages for those searches.
I launched my question because I am worried that my site will go down in the organic ranking because Google could consider all those product pages as duplicated content. I never worried before because I'm in the top 3 for years now. I only started to worry the moment I started to use SEOmoz and they give me thousands of errors for duplicated content.
Mainly, how much must a page differ in content to be considered unique and not risking a penalty from Google for duplicated content. Or otherwise, how much must a page differ for SEOmoz not considering it anymore duplicated content.
-
This is common for eCommerce sites, the error should be taken seriously, however there usually isn't an easy fix. The end goal of course is not necessarily for Google or any SE to index them, rather that when a particular keyword is hit the page is returned in the results.
Last year I upgraded our ecommerce site which sells orings (very similar products) I spent a lot of extra time to try and differentiate each o-ring page from one another. In the end it paid off, no duplicate content, all pages indexed, and placing well in SERP's.
So to answer your question while having them in Google's index is helpful, I would say you should worry about the duplicate content error as it is indicative that crawlers / search engines may have trouble returning the correct page for your specific keywords.
Hope that makes sense
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
-
Multiple listings for the same product - how to avoid duplication?
Hi everyone, We are working on an e-commerce site that has three different physical stores that each hold different products in stock. A listing is created on the website for each product in each location but if the same product is in all three stores the images and description are duplicate content We can't have one product page and tag locations to it as this would then require keeping two different stock systems updated, but is there a way to avoid the three pages being duplicates of each other? Many thanks for the advice!
Content Development | | A_Q0 -
Content Architecture - Breakout Pages
If you have a page that summarizes four different product types adequately in a chart that requires no scroll, is there an SEO justification to also breaking out each product into a separate page, but basically it would contain the same information? The SEO in me says yes, because that's more crawlable content you can optimize, but wouldn't it go against usability and general common sense?
Content Development | | SSFCU0 -
How to optimize content pages with ecommerce?
Some content pages act as buyers guides for certain products for example Used Paddle Boards for Sale - http://www.islesurfboards.com/used-paddle-boards-for-sale.aspx this is a content page that gets huge amount of traffic and is pure content with no products on the page, but we also have a ecommerce section of the site that is Used Paddle Boards for Sale -http://www.islesurfboards.com/buy-used-paddle-boards-for-sale.aspx however this page just has a small paragraph and all the ecommerce product related to this section on the page. The content only page above gets all the traffic and rank and then they click over to the actual ecomm section wiht the products from a link on that page. Should i merge these two together so its just one page and put the content on the ecom page? If i do all the content with push the ecommerce products down which is not good so what does anyone recommend as a best practice? Also will this mess up the content pages rank is i merge them assuming i redirect? or Keep them seperate like i have with a content page regarding "used paddle boards for sale" and an ecommerce page that sells acutal "used paddle boards for sale"
Content Development | | isle_surf0 -
Correction Duplicate Page Title Problems for a Blog
EDITED: To just focus on the issue at hand. I am trying to figure out the SEO rules instead of just working on the content. Please bear with me. I am adept technically. I just do not know the rules of the SEO process or even some of the termology. So I’m trying to attack problems one at time. Today’s problem – **Duplicate Page Titles ** We evidently have thousands of Duplicate Page Titles. We are using Joomla 2.5 & Easyblog. Our sitemap is automated from XML Sitemap Easyblog takes the title of the sites and uses it for a name of the summary pages. We post 5 blog items per page and all the names are the same. http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=5 Page Title = Site Name http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=10 Page Title = Site Name A similar thing happens on the sorting by Author or Category etc etc. Basically non-duplicate pages are looking like duplicates. What is the best practice / approach? Using the Robot.txt or XML Sitemap to tell Google not to crawl these pages? Writing a script or edit the Easyblog code to edit the 2000 duplicate Page Titles? Other thoughts?
Content Development | | Romana0 -
Google RSS Feed News Feed To Inner Pages
Ive been working on a large ecommerce website that has thousands of pages, although we are working on adding custom content daily to the largest pages, we have "defaul content" with dynamic tags matching search query. Someone recommend we add a google Rss feed where they can also add some type of tag. Is this a bad idea? Ive asked in the past but my main concern is issue with duplicate content, It would be next to impossible to have all pages filled with custom content. Any help much appreciated!! Thank you!
Content Development | | TP_Marketing0 -
Is the Page Authority/Rank of my corporate site affected by my blog's PA/PR and vice versa?
If I host my blog on my corporate site (it is a wordpress blog) will the page authority and page rank of my site translate to the blog? And does this also go the other way around? My gut says this would make sense, and I think I have seen it in action with other corporate sites that host their wordpress blogs, but I want to be completely sure. Even better, if someone can explain to me how this works, that would be super helpful!
Content Development | | Kendi0 -
Does anyone have some examples of Ecommerce websites that have great product reviews that are SEO friendly?
I am trying setup product reviews on an Ecommerce site and was wondering if there were some good websites to create a model around that is SEO friendly. Right now my reviews are in a separate directory off the review (http://www.example.com/review/product/etc) and I would like my reviews to be attributed to the product page to add in free, fresh, unique content that contains valuable information for both the user and SEO (new keyword derivatives). Also any suggestions on getting users to leave reviews? Whether it is a monetary incentive/coupon or a free method (of course this is preferred :)) Thanks in advance!
Content Development | | ResponseMine0 -
What is the best way to remove old pages (if at all)?
Hi, I have a client who has thousands of pages on his site - 50,000+. It is a news website so most of these pages are old news articles and blog posts that receive very little traffic. We are moving to a new content management system and are debating on whether or not to keep all that old content. So far our decision is to keep the content that has gotten at least 100+ visits from Bing or Google in the last 6 months but dump everything else. This amounts to around 30,000 or so pages most of which have several links pointing to them. My question is from an SEO standpoint is that okay to do? We'd not only lose pages but links as well. Part of me thinks that in light of the Panda update getting rid of old content that is good but not great could about help out the site (we do great in the SERPs and actually got a bump in traffic after the Panda update to new articles/posts). However, we obviously don't want to cause problems and that is why I'd appreciate the thoughts and ideas on the best way to handle this major downsizing in content. Thanks!
Content Development | | Matthew_Edgar0