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
-
Categories VS Tag Duplicate Content
Hello Moz community, I have a question about categories and tags . Our customer www.elshow.pe just had a redesign of its website. We use the same categories listed before . The only change was that two sub categories were added ( these sub-categories were popular tags before ) .Then now I have 2 URL's covering the same content: The first is the URL of the subcategory : www.elshow.pe/realitys/combate/ The second is the URL that is generated by the tag "combate" that is www.elshow.pe/noticias/combate/ I have the same with the second sub category: "Esto es guerra" www.elshow.pe/realitys/esto-es-guerra/ www.elshow.pe/noticias/esto-es-guerra/ The problem is when I search the keyword "combate" in my country (Perú), the URL that positions is the tag URL in 1st page. But, when I search for "esto es guerra" the URL that positions is the **sub category **in the second page. I also check in OSE both links and sub categories goes better than tags. So what do you guys recommend for this? 301 redirect? canonicals? Any coment is welcome. Thanks a lot for your time. Italo,
Technical SEO | | neoconsulting
@italominano WmzlklG.png 1RKcoX8.png0 -
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 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
How to solve Parameter Issue causing Duplicate Content
Hi everyone, My site home page comes up in SERP with following url www.sitename/?referer=indiagrid My question is:- Should I disallow using robots.txt.? or 301 redirect to the home page Other issue is i have few dynamic generated URL's for a form http://www.www.sitename/career-form.php?position=SEO Executive I am using parameter "position" in URL Parameter in GWT. But still my pages are indexed that is leading to duplicate page content. Please help me out.
Technical SEO | | himanshu3019890 -
Development Website Duplicate Content Issue
Hi, We launched a client's website around 7th January 2013 (http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk), we originally constructed the website on a development domain (http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk) which was active for around 6-8 months (the dev site was unblocked from search engines for the first 3-4 months, but then blocked again) before we migrated dev --> live. In late Jan 2013 changed the robots.txt file to allow search engines to index the website. A week later I accidentally logged into the DEV website and also changed the robots.txt file to allow the search engines to index it. This obviously caused a duplicate content issue as both sites were identical. I realised what I had done a couple of days later and blocked the dev site from the search engines with the robots.txt file. Most of the pages from the dev site had been de-indexed from Google apart from 3, the home page (dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk, and two blog pages). The live site has 184 pages indexed in Google. So I thought the last 3 dev pages would disappear after a few weeks. I checked back late February and the 3 dev site pages were still indexed in Google. I decided to 301 redirect the dev site to the live site to tell Google to rank the live site and to ignore the dev site content. I also checked the robots.txt file on the dev site and this was blocking search engines too. But still the dev site is being found in Google wherever the live site should be found. When I do find the dev site in Google it displays this; Roller Banners Cheap » admin <cite>dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/</cite><a id="srsl_0" class="pplsrsla" tabindex="0" data-ved="0CEQQ5hkwAA" data-url="http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/" data-title="Roller Banners Cheap » admin" data-sli="srsl_0" data-ci="srslc_0" data-vli="srslcl_0" data-slg="webres"></a>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.This is really affecting our clients SEO plan and we can't seem to remove the dev site or rank the live site in Google.Please can anyone help?
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on product pages?
Hi, I'm creating a bunch of product pages for courses for a university and I'm concerned about duplicate content penalties. While the page names are different and some of the test is different, much of the text is the same between pairs of pages. I.e. a BA and an MA in a particular subject (say 'hairdressing' will have the same subject descriptions, school introduction paragraph, industry overview paragraph etc. 1. Is this a problem? In a site with 100 pages, if sets of 2 pages have about 50% identical content... 2. If it is a problem, is there anything I can do, other than rewrite the text? 3. From a search perspective, would both pages show up in search results in searches related to 'hairdressing courses' 'study hairdressing' etc? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Duplicate Content - That Old Chestnut!!!
Hi Guys, Hope all is well, I have a question if I may? I have several articles which we have written and I want to try and find out the best way to post these but I have a number of concerns. I am hoping to use the content in an attempt to increase the Kudos of our site by providing quality content and hopefully receiving decent back links. 1. In terms of duplicate content should I only post it on one place or should I post the article in several places? Also where would you say the top 5 or 10 places would be? These are articles on XML, Social Media & Back Links. 2. Can I post the article on another blog or article directory and post it on my websites blog or is this a bad idea? A million thanks for any guidance. Kind Regards, C
Technical SEO | | fenwaymedia0 -
Duplicate Content -->?ss=facebook
Hi there, When searching site:mysite.com my keyword I found the "same page" twice in the SERP's. The URL's look like this: Page 1: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm Page 2: www.example.com/category/productpage.htm**?ss=facebook** The ?ss=facebook is caused by a bookmark button inserted in some of our product pages. My question is... will the canonical tag do to solve this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15565529539090