How to handle product pages with similar information
-
We have thousands of product pages with similar information but differentiating variables such as length/width.
Example:
We built individual products instead of grouped products because we recommend specific part numbers for specific make, model, year boats through our finder tool.
These pages have recently started showing up in SEOmoz as duplicate content and we are looking for solutions to solve it. We have considered creating a "parent page" that lists all sizes and then using a rel canonical on each individual page to tell google that the parent page is the preferred page.
Any thoughts or other ideas on this?
-
Hello Jim,
Ben's suggestion is typically what I would suggest as well, but I understand you have a situation that is unique to companies that sell parts to items like boats, vehicles, appliances, etcetera... in which case a single product page with variables won't work because you're dealing with completely different skus / part numbers.
In this case I like your idea of creating a single landing page and then using the rel canonical tag on the others. This way the other pages are still available to users who need a specific product part number, but search engines can see that these are all URL-variations of the same content.
Another, similar option would be to use variables in the URL and instruct Google and Bing to ignore those variables and treat them as if they were the base URL. Example:
And this would be the canonical / base URL:
www.savvyboater.com/store/p/Cover-for-V-Hull-Fishing-Boat-with-Side-Console-O-B-17-X-92-.aspx
That may be a problem from the development side because your standard URL includes the product's unique identifier at the beginning, as in:
http://www.savvyboater.com/store/p/2100-Cover-for-V-Hull-Fishing-Boat-with-Side-Console-O-B-14-X-74-.aspx
An example of a problem that could arise is if you decide to just choose one product to be the main one, as in:
http://www.savvyboater.com/store/p/2100-Cover-for-V-Hull-Fishing-Boat-with-Side-Console-O-B-14-X-74-.aspx**?variant=72217P**
http://www.savvyboater.com/store/p/2100-Cover-for-V-Hull-Fishing-Boat-with-Side-Console-O-B-14-X-74-.aspx**?variant=**72216P
But then what happens if 2100 goes out of stock or is removed? Would every other model then be inaccessible at that URL?
I'd have to know more about this before helping with that issue, but it may not be a problem at all. You'll have to discuss options with your developers and go from there.
Good luck!
-
Thanks for the response, Ben. The reason we have separate pages for size is because we recommend a specific part number (size) for specific make, model years. That's our main dilemma here...
Example: A customer goes through our boat cover finder and selects "Bayliner, Capri 160 O/B (Years: 2001-2004).
We would specifically recommend part number 77016 for that customer...if we group 77016 with 77017, 77018, 77019...there would be no way to recommend the exact cover that will fit the customers boat. Instead, we would be recommending a "group" of covers which is unhelpful to the customer (and could cause a lot of returns).
-
Unless there are other factors limiting you I would probably bring all of the variables onto a single page and treat size as a variable similar to the way you treat colours.
So you don't currently have separate pages for Burgundy and Caribbean Blue covers so why not do the same for size? You would want to adjust the copy to indicate that the product is available in different sizes and obviously this would require reworking the page but if you're going to create a parent page anyway then you might as well.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Traffic to blog home page is going down after changing my WordPress Theme
I recently changed my wordpress theme from a standard free theme to a newer theme. The home page I switched up a bit adding more calls to action to some of our top posts and leading people to popular categories and so on. This greatly improved the usability of our site as it allowed us to highlight new posts. The previous free template simply listed 10 of our most recent posts on a page with small snippets and then you had to move to the next page to keep reading. Since switching my theme the blog traffic has stayed relatively level. That being said, the specific posts traffic is going up a lot whereas the organic traffic to the blog homepage is now nearly depleted. Is this a common thing to happen or is there anything I can do to fix this issue?
Content Development | | saultienut0 -
Wordpress Blog Pages, Duplicate Title Tag
Anyone have any experience in fixing the duplicate Title tag on a Wordpress blog multiple pages Basically the title tag remains the same on the pages /Blog/ /Blog/Page/2/ /Blog/Page/3/ My good friend Yoast Plugin doesn't seem to of resolved this (Unless i have missed something?) I don't really see this to be effecting anything and wouldn't of through it would either, but it would be nice to not see the notification within Moz site crawls and campaigns etc, its more of a cosmetic problem Any solutions ? Thanks James
Content Development | | Antony_Towle0 -
On page content and PDF - Dup?
Hi We are writing a useful article which we want to put on our site, but we also want to add it as a pdf which people can download - will this be classed as dup copy?
Content Development | | jj34340 -
Word Press Page vs Post
Hello, I have a site that is dedicated to real estate. I designed it in dreamweaver. I also attached a blog to it with wordpress. Its self hosted. My question is what is the best way to increase my search rankings with wordpress? Page vs Post? Any tips?
Content Development | | bronxpad0 -
Is it advisable to have unique pages for different cities/states though there wouldnt be any actual differentiation in the actual content.
Is it advisable to have unique pages for different cities/states though there wouldnt be any actual differentiation in the content. For example should we have separate pages for "hammers in california" & "hammers in new york". The product is same and content more or less the same. The search volume for individual queries is low but collectively makes a large number. The unique title tag automatically will generate traffic. So does it make sense to make 50 such pages. Else is there any way to uniquely target 50 such queries/month/city
Content Development | | DYo0 -
Root page not coming up first
Hello. Any idea why site:www.bestprice.gr query doesn't bring the www.bestprice.gr as the first result? Could it be that the site is under a penalty? Thanks.
Content Development | | phaistonian0 -
I have a page where you can download a PDF of the material - should I exclude the PDF from the search engines?
In my niche, there is a controversial research article that is very popular. I am writing a rebuttal to this article and giving another point of view. My article has the potential to be really good link bait for my site. The original article is often printed out to be shown to professionals in my niche. My hope is that people will do the same with mine. So, I plan to have a PDF version of my article available on my page. The article that is visible on my site (i.e. non PDF) will be a graphic rich article that is easy for the reader to go through. I plan to have the PDF have all of the same text, but it won't have as many graphics - it will look more like a scientific research article. So, should I exclude the pdf from search engines so that it isn't duplicate content? Or does that even matter seeing as it is a duplicate of my own content? I want people to link to the main article, not the pdf. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!
Content Development | | MarieHaynes1 -
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