Simular product pages

[noordhout]

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

[noordhout]

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?

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[noordhout]

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.

[SoftzSolutions]

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.

[noordhout]

The pages you show are (in my eyes) completely different, much more different than the ones I have.

Reo 2021418132CB

Reo 2021418132WC

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.

[donford]

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

Fluorocarbon
Nitrile

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.

[noordhout]

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.

[donford]

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