Canonical tags and product descriptions

[MickEdwards]

I just wanted to check what you guys thought of this strategy for duplicate product descriptions.

A sample product is a letter bracelet - a, b, c etc so there are 26 products with identical descriptions.  It is going to be extremely difficult to come up with 25 new unique descriptions so with recommendation i'm looking to use the canonical tag.  I can't set any to no-index because visitors will look for explicit letters.

Because the titles only differ by the letter then a search for either

• letter bracelet
• letter a bracelet
• letter i bracelet

will just return results for 'letter bracelet' due to stop words unless the searcher explicitly searches for 'letter "a" bracelet.

So I reckon I can make 4 new unique descriptions.  I research what are the most popular letters picking 5 from the top (excluding 'a' and 'i').  Equally share the remaining letters between those 5 and with each group set a canonical tag pointing to the primary letter of that group.

Does this seem a sensible thing to do?

[Everett]

Hello PremioOscar,

That may be the best option, and probably the one I'd choose, but I think he is hoping to rank for searches specific to each letter (e.g. Letter A Bracelet, Letter H Bracelet...) which may not be possible with a single page. By breaking them up into groups (e.g. A-G, H-M...) he can target at least one letter per group. Each group would have its own unique description, which is scaleable while each letter having its own is not.

I would argue that each letter having its own unique description is indeed scaleable if you're talking about one product. I could have written three of them in the time it took to write this reply. However, if this letter situation is repeated across dozens or hundreds of products I would consider the idea presented by  Michael.

Does that make sense?

[PremioOscar]

Hi there,

One way you could do this is to create a specific page named, let's say letter bracelet and then with a drop down menu' list all the items and use the canonical tag to tell google that all the other product pages refer to that page.

In this way you have just one page and one product description for products that are pretty much the same.

I did this for my products that were different in colour and length solving the problem of duplicate content and also saving myself the time to write different descriprions for similar products

Hope it helps