How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
-
Hi,
I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind:
-Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size
-Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique
I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website.
Looking forward to your opinions and solutions.
Jeroen
-
I agree with Laura, Big Commerce, OpenCart, OSCommerce, these would all be great solutions. I think Big Commerce is the best hosted platform on the market right now. OpenCart and OSCommerce are not hosted solutions, and they are both open source so you would have to have some coding experience to get them set up.
-
I agree with Monica and Hutch. One product with product options is the best practice, but you stated that this was impossible with your current shopping cart. If most of your products have different sizes and colors, it may be worth it to switch to a different ecommerce solution. It may be costly in the short term, but you'll have greater success over the long term.
-
Adding product options is usually best practice, like Hutch said.
Using canonical tags would be the next best thing. If you have Product A that has 6 colors and subsequently you have 6 pages for product A, I would create one page with a product description and product reviews. I would make that the canonical page. For the 6 subsequent pages I would create them to mirror the first page, but only have details specific to the color on that page. Then, add the Rel = Canonical tags to those 6 pages. All of the link juice and page authority will be pointed to the main product page.
The second thing I would do is add links to the specific pages with different colors to the content on the main page. This will help users find it easier and help with overall user experience.
So, it would look something like this:
Product A - Description, Reviews, Links to all versions of product A. Fully optimized page for Product A
Product A Colors 1 - 6, Add REL=Canonical tags with Product A as the Canonical. Include descriptions specific to the individual colors. Using the canonical tags will tell the engines that your preferred page is Product A, which will help you control the negative effects of the duplicate content.
-
If the products are all but the same besides color, would you be able to implement something like amazon has, where each product is only one page and you select the color/size option within the the product framework? This way instead of having a bunch of pages that are basically the same product, all of your effort can go to one page per product.
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
-
Looking at creating some auto-generated pages - duplicate content?
Hi Everyone! We just launched a new version of our research site and the main CTA on the page sends users to a subdomain that's blocked by robots.txt. The subdomain link is one of our PPC landing pages and they would be duplicate content for every model (cars). We're also looking at a new content stream of deals pages, on the main domain. The thought process was that we could rank these pages for things like "Volkswagen golf deals" and also use them as canonical URLs from the PPC pages so that Panda doesn't get mad at us for sending hundreds of links to a subdomain that's blocked. It's going to take us a lot of time to write the copy for the deals pages, so if we auto-generate it by pulling a paragraph of copy from the car review, and numerical stats about that model, will it be classes as duplicate and/or is there any downside to doing it? Review Page: http://www.carwow.co.uk/car-reviews/Ford/Fiesta Deals Page: http://www.carwow.co.uk/deals/Ford/Fiesta PPC Landing Page: http://quotes.carwow.co.uk/buy/Ford/Fiesta I can't help but feel that this may all be a bit overkill and perhaps it makes more sense to build 1 central deals page per model with unique content that we can also send the PPC traffic to, then life any block from the quotes. subdomain. But that will take time and we'd also like a quick solution. I'd also question if it's even an issue to link to a blocked subdomain, Google adds the quote URL into the index but can't crawl it, which I've been told is bad - but is it bad enough to do something about? Thanks, JP
Technical SEO | | Matt.Carwow0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Duplicate page titles
Hi, I have a Joomla 2.5 site and I use categoryblogs. So I have a page with "reviews". All the reviews are shown on this page and there are about 15 pages of it. In my SEOMoz crawl result I get 71 errors ! about "duplicate titles". How can I diminish this? I don't know how to show all the reviews in a proper way other than what I have accomplished with categoryblog. Patrick
Technical SEO | | paddydaddy0 -
NOINDEX,FOLLOW on product pages
Hi Can I have people's thoughts on something please. We sell wedding stationery and whilst we can generate lots of good content describing a particular range of stationery we can't relistically differentiate at a product level. So imagine we have three ranges Range 1 - A Bird Range 2 - A Heart Range 3 - A Flower Within each of these ranges we would have invitations, menus, place cards, magnets etc. The ranges vary quite alot so we can write good textual keyword rich descriptions that attract traffic (i.e. one about the bird, one about the heart and one about the flower). However the individual products within a range just reflect the design for the range as a whole (as all items in a range match). Therefore we can't just copy the content down to the product level and if we just describe the generic attributes of the products they will alll be very similar. We have over 1,000 "products" easily so I am conscious of creating too much duplication over the site in case Mr Panda comes to call. So I was thinking that I "might" NOINDEX, FOLLOW the product pages to avoid this duplication and put lots of effort into making my category pages much better and content rich. The site would be smaller in the index BUT I do not really expect to generate traffic from the product pages because they are not branded items and any searches looking for particular features of our stationery would be picked up, much more effectively, by the category pages. Any thoughts on this one? Gary
Technical SEO | | gtrotter6660 -
Question about content on ecommerce pages.
Long time ago we hired a seo company to do seo in our website and one of the things they did is that they wrote long text on the category pages of our products. Example here: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/refurbished-printers/wide-format-laser-refurbished-printers Now my marketing person is saying that if its possible to put the text below the items, technically I will find out how to do it, but from your seo experience, is it good or bad? What about if we short those texts to one paragraph only? Thanks
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
High number of Duplicate Page titles and Content related to index.php
It appears that every page on our site (www.bridgewinners.com) also creates a version of itself with a suffix. This results in Seomoz indicating that there are thousands of duplicate titles and content. 1. Does this matter? If so, how much? 2. How do I eliminate this (we are using joomla)? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jfeld2220 -
Snippets on every page considered duplicate content?
If I create a page that pulls a 10 snippets of information from various external site, would that content be considered duplicate content? If I link to the source, would it be recommended to use a "nofollow" tag?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | | RiseSEO0