Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ecommerce Site - Duplicate product descriptions & SKU pages
-
Hi
I have a couple of questions regarding the best way to optimise SKU pages on a large ecommerce site.
At the moment we have 2 landing pages per product - one is the primary landing page with no SKU, the other includes the SKU in the URL so our sales people & customers can find it when using the search facility on the site. The SKU landing page has a canonical pointing to the primary page as they're duplicates.
Is this the best way? Or is it better to have the one page with the SKU in the URL?
Also, we have loads of products with the very similar product descriptions, I am working on trying to include a unique paragraph or few sentences on these to improve the content - how dangerous is the duplicate content within your own site?
I know its best to have totally unique content, but it won't be possible on a site with thousands of products and a small team. At the moment I am trying to prioritise the products to update.
Thank you
-
Hi,
Yes we use the SKU's on the other pages too. Thanks for everyone's feedback
-
Thanks, I'll set up some tests to see if this proves anything either way
Thanks
-
Hmmmm, not sure they will be ranked better, especially if they already have canonical permanent pages.
Why not use the permanent URLs in the emails also. They will look neater too for the end user and SERPS as the
www.yourdomain.com/storage-boxes/niceday-economy-archive-boxes
Looks better than
www.yourdomain.com/storage-boxes/46546545021.php etc You could always try a 301 redirect for the SKU pages so they point to the nice URL pages.
-
Also just to add, with regard to product pages - we link to the SKU page in email marketing & these URL's with the SKU are what users can find when searching in the onsite search facility.
As the urls with the SKU's will get more traffic & active users through other mediums, could this affect how Google rates them?
With regard to internal links we link the the permanent URL and not the SKU URL however
-
These are really the only two I am aware of for actual page content over meta etc. Other Mozzers may have some additional tools they could share... Good luck
-
Great thank you.
Do you know of any good internal duplicate content checkers? I am looking at copyscape or siteliner.
Thanks
-
In that case, if you can I would definitely try and create some unique content for these category pages, I understand it can be difficult when talking about boxes when they all kind of do the same thing. Storage boxes, moving boxes, cardboard boxes, plastic boxes, containers.... what do they all do? they store and hold things right!.
I used to work for a large national office supplies company so know your pain, but a little extra content may help make a difference if you really need a particular category page to rank better against your competitors in what is already a very difficult and competitive area.
-
Great thanks for your input.
With regard to the duplicate content, it's not so much on these pages which are canonicalised, it's more so on ranges of products under separate URLs. e.g. Storage boxes
A lot of the ranges are so similar, that the product description points are the same and I wanted to include some unique text - if it's worth doing
Thanks!
-
By canonicalising the SKU page to your intended landing/product page I think you are doing the best option for your situation, that is providing the URL features the product name etc. You seem to be very clued up and by the sounds of it doing everything right, I would not think that people in general would search for a SKU so having the other page as the dominant authority page is probably best.
However, as an option rather than having two pages surely you could have just one and have the search facility on your site pull back the landing page based in the SKU as a filterable/searchable element.
That way you would not need to have multiple pages and have to create double the unique content as you would only have once page to look after.
As for the similar pages, I agree adding some unique content to help differentiate them would help.
Hope that helps
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
-
SEM Rush & Duplicate content
Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Schema markup concerning category pages on an ecommerce site
We are adding json+ld data to an ecommerce site and myself and one of the other people working on the site are having a minor disagreement on things. What it comes down to is how to mark up the category page. One of us says it needs to be marked up with as an Itempage, https://schema.org/ItemPage The other says it needs to be marked up as products, with multiple product instances in the schema, https://schema.org/Product The main sticking point on the Itemlist is that Itemlist is a child of intangible, so there is a feeling that should be used for things like track listings or other arbitrary data.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LesleyPaone2 -
What do you add to your robots.txt on your ecommerce sites?
We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following: Checkout Basket Then possibly: Price Theme Sortby other misc filters. What do you include?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?
Hi, Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site? is there any syntax i can use in Google search to list just pages that give 404? Tool/Site that can scan all pages in Google Index and give me this report. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Duplicate internal links on page, any benefit to nofollow
Link spam is naturally a hot topic amongst SEO's, particularly post Penguin. While digging around forums etc, I watched a video blog from Matt Cutts posted a while ago that suggests that Google only pays attention to the first instance of a link on the page As most websites will have multiple instances of a links (header, footer and body text), is it beneficial to nofollow the additional instances of the link? Also as the first instance of a link will in most cases be within the header nav, does that then make the content link text critical or can good on page optimisation be pulled from the title attribute? I would appreciate the experiences and thoughts Mozzers thoughts on this thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustinTaylor880 -
Max # of Products / Links per Page on E-Commerce Site
We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page. Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products. While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links. Would love some guidance on: Maximum number of internal links on a page If Google frowns on really long category pages Anything else I should be considering when making this decision Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY2