Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
-
Hi guys
Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now.
I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products.
A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase).
Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc.
Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content.
Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue.
If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
-
The canonical should pass link equity similar to a 301 redirect.
-
Thanks Mike. It certainly sounds like moving all SKUs onto 1 page is preferable. I suspect that I may need to spend a bit of dosh getting the website's on-page structure amended if going down this approach.
With regards to point 1, I assume the pages will still be crawled but any link equity would be passed to the canonicalised version of the page?
-
I agree with Everett from a standpoint of User Experience. It could potentially be better for users if they appeared on a product page where they could then choose color, size, etc. variables for their product instead of having to click through multiple pages to find the right one or scroll through a huge list of variations.
The reduction in pages should also help consolidate link equity and keep pages from cannibalizing each other in the SERPs.
As for Takeshi's suggestion on Canonicals, I'm a fan of the rel=canonical tag but the potential problem with using them in this instance is twofold. 1) As Takeshi mentioned: "as far as Google is concerned you only have 1 page with the content on it" and 2) Canonicals are suggestions not directives so the search engines may choose not to recognize it if not used properly.
-
As I said, that would be a good second choice, but I'd go with the first option (putting all product variants like size/color on the same page and allowing the user to select which one/s they want to purchase) because the other options still leave a potentially huge amount of product URLs out there for Google to crawl.
Google has to crawl them to see the rel canonical tag. You may only have a certain amount of crawl budget. If you can cut down the amount of URLs on your site that Google has to crawl by as much as half simply by allowing users to select a variant color or size on a product page I think that is best for SEO, as well as for user experience.
-
Thanks for the advice guys.
What do you think of Takeshi's advice below regarding adding canonical link to product page that points to a product category page
I.e. we have 20 of the same jumpers of different sizes, colours. A canonical tag is added to the product page that points to a parent page for the jumper, rather than the specific product page.
-
Thanks Takeshi - this approach sounds like something I can implement sooner rather than later.
Have you had success using it?
-
Thanks Mike - this certainly makes sense.
My product pages do not currently change the URL parameters depending ont he product sku the visitor changes , but the approach you've taken sounds perfect for your setup
-
Similar to what BJS1976 and Takeshi stated, the way we handled the bulk of duplicate content issues from a similar circumstance for our ecommerce site was handling the different varieties of the same product through parameters and then canonicalizing the parameters to the version of the URL sans parameter.
For example, due to database reasons /product1.php?color=42 and /product1.php?color=30 are the same product but one is red and one is blue, the pages are exactly the same & have radials/buttons/dropdowns to choose any available color, /product1.php would default to one specific variation we chose (usually the best selling color) and then /product1.php?color=42 and /product1.php?color=30 had a rel=canonical tag added pointing at /product1.php
For any remaining products flagged as duplicates that couldn't be fixed that way, we set those aside to have myself and another copywriter work on creating further content that would set them apart enough as to not be duplicates.
-
BJS1976 makes some good suggestions.
Another option is to create a category type page that lists all the product variations on it, then canonical each of the individual products to the category page. That way, you still have multiple product pages, but as far as Google is concerned you only have 1 page with the content on it.
-
Hi there,
I'm also working on an ecom site using Magento - in short, there are a couple of ways that come to mind in how to deal with this:
-
Create grouped or configurable products that bring these simple products into 1 single product - customer then chooses size and colour for example.
-
Rewrite a lot of unique content in the product descriptions for each variation.
In my experience, sales convert better on option 1, plus my gut tells me they are favoured by Google.
Good luck!
-
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
-
Reviews on Product Page or Separated
Good Afternoon We currently have our individual product information pages set-up with a link through to a separate review page optimised for the term "Product A Reviews" I was reading about structured data and if I read correctly, the reviews should sit with the marked up product data so I was wondering whether to merge them back into one page. We have many reviews so the review pages are paginated in blocks of 25 My options are: Leave as it is, product info page and separate review page Merge the review content back in to the main page and have the pagination work on that page Include the first 25 reviews on the product info page then when user clicks through to page 2, 3 etc they're taken to the separated review page. In that way the product page would regularly get new content and we can still have a page specifically targeted for reviews. From the users point of view, they probably aren't even aware they're being taken to a separate reviews page so with that in mind as I'm typing this maybe they should be one page again
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
What is the process for allowing someone to publish a blog post on another site? (duplicate content issue?)
I have a client who allowed a related business to use a blog post from my clients site and reposted to the related businesses site. The problem is the post was copied word for word. There is an introduction and a link back to the website but not to the post itself. I now manage the related business as well. So I have creative control over both websites as well as SEO duties. What is the best practice for this type of blog post syndication? Can the content appear on both sites?
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Possible duplicate content issue with my Blog and archive pages . Any help greatly appreciated
Dear Mozzers, I have been looking at my news section on my eCommerce site and I think I may have a duplicate content issue and wanted some advice on whether I do and if so , how best I handle this. http://www.website.co.uk/news
Technical SEO | | PeteC12
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:1
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:2
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:3
http://www.website.co.uk/news/limit:9999 (This is show all) I also have the ability of showing articles by month : http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/04 (April)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/03 (March)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/02 (Feb)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/01 (Jan) I am wondering if there's a duplicate issue here or not given that I also articles by month as well and if so how best I handle this.? I already do pagination on my news pages (page 1 , page 2) by using rel=next and rel=Prev but I don't have an canconical or anything as yet. I enclose a couple of links if this would help and would appreciate if someone could take a browse. I have a View All link on my homepage for for all news items - http://goo.gl/JPPIvQ I which have a different urls - March 2015 Articles - http://goo.gl/0O1wYD and April 2015 articles - http://goo.gl/GdW2oK On another note, These articles are also linked to from the relevant category landing pages on my website to help with SEO. I have not used H tags on the article links in my landing pages , just displaying the weblink back to the news article.I've done this to try and improve the PR and rankings of my landing pages. Just wondered if anyone has any comments as to whether thats a good or bad idea and whether I could improve it in any way - An example is here (scroll down the page to the pressure washing guides) - http://goo.gl/nnRE49 Thanks Pete0 -
Issue with duplicate content
Hello guys, i have a question about duplicate content. Recently I noticed that MOZ's system reports a lot of duplicate content on one of my sites. I'm a little confused what i should do with that because this content is created automatically. All the duplicate content comes from subdomain of my site where we actually share cool images with people. This subdomain is actually pointing to our Tumblr blog where people re-blog our posts and images a lot. I'm really confused how all this duplicate content is created and what i should do to prevent it. Please tell me whether i need to "noindex", "nofollow" that subdomain or you can suggest something better to resolve that issue. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
How to handle city-based product selection and duplicate content?
Hi everyone, I've been searching the interwebs for a solution to my problem, but haven't really found anything conclusive. I've got a client with duplicate content issues; their website not only has a nation-wide website, but also 10 different sub-categories for different cities, with each subcategory having the same content as the main website. The reason they wanted city-based websites was due to the changing product offerings in each city. So City 1 may not have all the products available that City 2 does. Needless to say this has caused some duplicate content issues as most sections of the website have been multiplied by 10. When a visitor lands on any page of the website, they are greeted by a pop up asking for their location, which will then redirect them to their selected version of the website. As the copy cannot really be changed enough for each city to make it unique, I've been looking into canonical tags, but this would mean the localised versions will not be indexed by Google. Has anyone had any experience of a similar situation where the product range changes according to location, but it doesn't hurt SEO? Thanks in advance for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Nimbus30000 -
SEOMOZ and non-duplicate duplicate content
Hi all, Looking through the lovely SEOMOZ report, by far its biggest complaint is that of perceived duplicate content. Its hard to avoid given the nature of eCommerce sites that oestensibly list products in a consistent framework. Most advice about duplicate content is about canonicalisation, but thats not really relevant when you have two different products being perceived as the same. Thing is, I might have ignored it but google ignores about 40% of our site map for I suspect the same reason. Basically I dont want us to appear "Spammy". Actually we do go to a lot of time to photograph and put a little flavour text for each product (in progress). I guess my question is, that given over 700 products, why 300ish of them would be considered duplicates and the remaning not? Here is a URL and one of its "duplicates" according to the SEOMOZ report: http://www.1010direct.com/DGV-DD1165-970-53/details.aspx
Technical SEO | | fretts
http://www.1010direct.com/TDV-019-GOLD-50/details.aspx Thanks for any help people0 -
Duplicate content in Magento
Hi all We got some serious issues with duplicate content on a Magento site that we are marketing. For example: http://www.citcop.se/varmepumpar-luft-luft/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw All of the above seem to work just fine as it is now but since they are excatly the same product they should ofcourse do a 301 redirect to the main page. Any ideas on how to sort this out in Magnto without having to resort to manual work in .htaccess? Have a great day Fredrik
Technical SEO | | Resultify0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, My site is being checked for errors by the PRO dashboard thing you get here and some odd duplicate content errors have appeared. Every page has a duplicate because you can see the page and the page/~username so... www.short-hairstyles.com is the same as www.short-hairstyles.com/~wwwshor I don't know if this is a problem or how the crawler found this (i'm sure I have never linked to it). But I'd like to know how to prevent it in case it is a problem if anyone knows please? Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0