Duplicate content through product variants
-
Hi,
Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique.
The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals.
In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants.
As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product.
I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of!
Kind Regards,
Nico
-
Hehehe yes we do usually!
-
Thanks for the hint!
Personally, I am a big fan of schema.org and marking up all the products has been on my further ToDo list.
-
Hi Martijn,
Thanks for your reply. I'll have to check with the responsible developer - but I fear that this option is not on the table. Then again, I have been hinted at that a complete redesign might eventually be. As I said below: Nobody who does SEO seems to have been around when the site was created. And we all know what happens in such a case, don't we?
-
Hi Matt,
If it were only that easy... I have since learnt that way back when the client had that website developed he specifically asked to NOT have an ecommerce website. (I, nor anybody advising on SEO, was not around back then AFAIK.)
The products are not connected. They are litereally independently created pages with the same template. The URLs are not parameter based but look like
http://www.example.de/category/subcategory1/subcategory2/product_name-further_description_1
http://www.example.de/category/subcategory1/subcategory2/product_name-further_descripittion_2
So, identical apart from the last bit that is NOT a parameter. And the last bit might be "750-kg" or "Alu" or "with-brakes". Thanks for the advice; I agree that it is generally a good starting point but sadly not possible in this case.
-
Just implemented something similar to this, and used canonicals. Also, if you're able to add more than just canonicals, possibly worth looking at microdata? We used schema.org isVariantOf for colors and size variants, not sure how much this influences googles understanding / search display, but it's widely recommended and seems unlikely to hurt. Implementing took a little trial and error, this helped as did google's schema testing tool.
-
What do the duplicate content URLs look like? In a lot of ecommerce systems you end up with parameter-based URLs such as:
http://www.example.com/products/women/dresses/green.htm
http://www.example.com/products/women?category=dresses&color=greenAccording to Google "When Google detects duplicate content, such as the pages in the example above, a Google algorithm groups the duplicate URLs into one cluster and selects what the algorithm thinks is the best URL to represent the cluster (and) tries to consolidate what we know about the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the one representative URL. However, when Google can't find all the URLs in a cluster or is unable to select the representative URL that you prefer, you can use the URL Parameters tool to give Google information about how to handle URLs containing specific parameters." (see more at Google Support)
If your URLs are parameter based I would suggest looking into handling them at that level in Search Console or (last resort) robots.txt as well. However, I'd start with canonicals and parameters if possible.
-
Hi Nico,
As you said it's far from prefect but I would indeed go with using a canonical on the pages that have duplicate variants. But if you're doing this already then it might be not that much more effort to also link them back on the back-end of your site so you can do more advanced things.
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
-
Using Product Page Content from an Offline Website
Hi all, We have two websites. One of the website's no longer sells product range A. However, on the second website, we would like to sell range A. We paid a copywriter to write some really good content for these ranges and we were wondering if we would get stung for duplicate content if we took these descriptions from website 1 and placed them on website 2. The products / descriptions are live anymore and haven't been for about 6 weeks. We're ranking for some great keywords at the moment and we don't want to spoil that. Thanks in advance! D
Technical SEO | | 10dales0 -
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
Product Duplicate Content Issue with Google Shopping
I have a site with approx 20,000 products. These products are resold to hundreds of other companies and are fed from one database therefore the content is duplicated many many times. To overcome this, we are launching the site with noindex meta tags on all product pages. (In phase 2 we will begin adding unique content for every product eek) However, we still want them to appear in Google Shopping. Will this happen or will it have to wait until we remove the noindex tags?
Technical SEO | | FGroup0 -
Worpress Tags Duplicate Content
I just fixed a tags duplicate content issue. I have noindexed the tags. Was wondering if anyone has ever fixed this issue and how long did it take you to recover from it? Just kind of want to know for a piece of mind.
Technical SEO | | deaddogdesign0 -
Pages with different content and meta description marked as duplicate content
I am running into an issue where I have pages with completely different body and meta description but they are still being marked as having the same content (Duplicate Page Content error). What am I missing here? Examples: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/what-to-expect-in-the-summer-internship
Technical SEO | | WallStreetOasis.com
and
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/something-ventured http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/im-in-the-long-run
and
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/image/jhjpeg0 -
Cross-domain duplicate content issue
Hey all, Just double-checking something. Here's the issue, briefly. One of my clients is a large law firm. The firm has a main site, and an additional site for an office in Atlanta. On the main site, there is a list of all attorneys and links to their profiles (that they wrote themselves). The Atlanta site has this as well, but lists only the attorneys located in that office. I would like to have the profiles for the Atlanta lawyers on both sites. Would rel=canonical work to avoid a dupe-content smackdown? The profiles should rank for Atlanta over the main site. This just means that G will drop the main site's profiles (for those attorneys) from their index, correct? No other weird side effects? I hope I worded all that clearly!
Technical SEO | | LCNetwork0 -
Duplicate Content
Many of the pages on my site are similar in structure/content but not exactly the same. What amount of content should be unique for Google to not consider it duplicate? If it is something like 50% unique would it be preferable to choose one page as the canonical instead of keeping them both as separate pages?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Long tail keywords and duplicate content (product description)
Hi <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> pro's, how are you doing these days? Hope everything is fine... Let's get down to business: I've got a little question about ecommerce sites with duplicate content (product descriptions). I'm already ranking top #1 for exact keyword matche's (did a lot of backlink work with exact keyword). That's fine. The question is: long tail keywords still getting lower results than the competitors, because they published the content first. How to beat them? What I need to do/work to outrank competitors on long tail keywords? (I really need this because almost keywords/products from my niche only have 10% of exact search's). Hope someone can give me a word of light on this! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | azaiats20