Combining reviews and duplicate content

[rbai]

We have some items in different colors or slightly different styles. For example if there is one series of helmets with almost same features and if we have many item pages we get reviews for each one seperate. We want to combine the reviews to increase our conversion rates. For example if style1 gets 5 reviews and style 2  gets1 review and style 3 has zero reviews combining them will help style 2 and style 3 conversion rates.

Our review system cannot put all these reviews in one page. So if we combine reviews each page will have duplicate review content. Will this be bad for SEO?

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

If the helmets are actually 3 different styles (rather than just colors) then these really are 3 different products that might have differences in terms of comfort, durability, design and customer satisfaction. Given this, I would not recommend showing the reviews of Style 1 on the the page for Style 2. It's not just a matter of whether or not you should duplicate content here, but rather, ensuring that your customer is being shown reviews that speak to the exact product they are considering buying. After all, what if a customer who purchased Style 1 writes that they they really appreciate the nylon comfort lining in the helmet, but Style 2 doesn't have this comfort lining? If a customer reads the reviews of Style 1 on the page for Style 2 and is misled about that comfort lining, they will be disappointed in the product.

So, a better path here would be to form a strategy for increasing the reviews of the actual products, rather than trying to make the reviews of one product serve as testimonial for others. I think it can be helpful to put yourself in the customer's shoes here. When you're looking for a product, you'd certainly want to read reviews about it, rather than reviews of a different product, right? In the online world, where we can't see/hold/examine an item in person, our best option is to glean information from product descriptions and reviews, and we wouldn't appreciate a mixup of customer sentiment being posted with the wrong product.

Hope these thoughts are helpful!

[Highland]

Not really. People are obsessed with calling duplicate content a penalty. It's not really a penalty as much as engines trying to sort the noise out. If pages A, B and C all have the same content, there's only room for a single #1 rank, so that means the other pages will have to lose out. They're not penalized, just not ranked as highly.

The place where duplicate content is harmful is if someone scrapes your site and outranks you. That's a different problem entirely. In your case, the concern is that you will harm your site. That's not the case. The engines will simply pick one review page in your case and devalue the rest. In my book that's not necessarily bad because people are still going to come to your site and read a review page.

Canonicals can help by letting you pick which page wins the duplicate race. You simply tell Google that B and C are duplicates of A and, thus, A wins #1.