Duplicate content on product pages
-
Hi,
We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication.
Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?
-
To be honest, this type of thing is definitely a weak point in my knowledge but if it were my site, I wouldn't be heading in this direction with it.
What you're essentially doing is obscuring duplicate content from search engines but presenting it to users which we know is a no-no. It may well be that search engines can't "see" that duplicate content just yet but that doesn't mean they won't in the next update.
More importantly, users aren't particularly engaged by seeing the same block of content over and over so it's kind of a waste of valuable screen real estate.
One other question to consider with this scenario: do users actually want to know about this manufacture process? This isn't a leading question. What I'm getting at is that content should always cover what the user wants to know, not what the business wants them to read about.
If this process is really just a sidenote for most users, risking content duplication to push it directly in front of them is a large and unnecessary risk.
Of course, if the process is a unique selling point that may actually persuade sales and/or build that rapport, disregard this point
-
What are your thoughts around using OnScroll() function because it seems the search engines don't crawl this function easily and therefore uploading the content in that way might be safer.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html
-
It's a frustrating problem to have, huh?
Rand did do a Whiteboard Friday on this general topic a while back which is fairly relevant here. As Dmitrii mentioned, option 1 is definitely the best option since the others mean content duplication of some form.
My best suggestion on this one would be to add a very short and enticing intro (I'm talking 1 or 2 lines) about that manufacture process and if they're interested, they can follow the link to the page all about it. Just make sure this link uses target="_blank" so it opens in a new tab for them. At least this way when they close that tab, they're right back to the product page they were on.
It is a risk but far safer than duplicating that same content across a bunch of products!
So, using Rand's advice from that WBF, you can pad out the content of your products very well and very uniquely and that line or 2 of text used as a "hook" to draw them to the other page is insignificant. Duplicate content is all about a ratio so if you have 2 lines of duplication amongst 500 words of unique and valuable text, it's not likely to be an issue.
Probably not the solution you were looking for but I hope it helps!
-
Hi there.
Well, don't put duplicates on every product page, that's for sure. The #1 option you have is very good idea. You say that you are afraid of users leaving product page and not coming back. Here is my idea:
Do option #1, but also dynamically "transfer" the product to that page. So, for instance you are on a product page domain.com/product1.php, when you click on a link about information (which is lets say domain.com/information.php), add a parameter to that link based on product page url you were coming from like so - domain.com/information.php?product1.
And then add extra section on information page with product details, possibility to add to cart etc, based on parameter. This way you can exclude urls with parameters from indexing (read here) or canonicalize all parameter pages to info page. This way you won't have any duplicate issues.
Cheers
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
-
Backup Server causing duplicate content flag?
Hi, Google is indexing pages from our backup server. Is this a duplicate content issue? There are essentially two versions of our entire domain indexed by Google. How do people typically handle this? Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Redirects & Authority when Updating Product Pages
Hi Quick question on SEO & product pages. We're changing suppliers, so discontinuing their range, adding new - but the products will be very similar - almost identical in some cases. I don't want to lose authority built up from current product pages, the only way to reuse these pages is to reuse SKUs - which we can't do. If I am redirecting these pages to new products which are similar, I know page authority will be passed - so is this the best option? Our links on the website will actually point to the final URL, rather than going through a redirect - if this is the case will it still pass authority? Thank you Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
Hello, We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools. However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below https://www.google.com.au/search?espv=2&q=site%3Awww.mypetwarehouse.com.au+inurl%3Agclid&oq=site%3A&gs_l=serp.3.0.35i39l2j0i67l4j0i10j0i67j0j0i131.58677.61871.0.63823.11.8.3.0.0.0.208.930.0j3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..8.3.419.nUJod6dYZmI Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation? Thanks, Stephen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyPetWarehouse0 -
Question about duplicate listings on site for product listings.
We list products on our site and suspect that we have been hit by Panda as we are duplicating listings across our own site. Not intentionally, we just have multiple pages listings the same content as they fall into multiple categories. Has anyone else had the same issue and if so how did you deal with it?.. Have you seen a change in results/rankings due to the changes you made?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
Multiply domains and duplicate content confusion
I've just found out that a client has multiple domains which are being indexed by google and so leading me to worry that they will be penalised for duplicate content. Wondered if anyone could confirm a) are we likely to be penalised? and b) what should we do about it? (i'm thinking just 301 redirect each domain to the main www.clientdomain.com...?). Actual domain = www.clientdomain.com But these also exist: www.hostmastr.clientdomain.com www.pop.clientdomain.com www.subscribers.clientdomain.com www.www2.clientdomain.com www.wwwww.clientdomain.com ps I have NO idea how/why all these domains exist I really appreciate any expertise on this issue, many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bisibee10 -
Content Landing Page
Hey Mozzers, I wanted to get some opinions on here. I'm going to be building out the content on my site a lot of the next couple of months, and have recently started thinking about creating a content landing page. For those not familiar with the concept it's the idea of building this page that basically just pulls together all the content you've written on a specific subject & serves as hopefully a link magnet & destination for people interested in the topic. So my question is this, I am just outlining all of the different posts & areas that I want to cover on specific topics & it is a lot. I'm talking ~20 posts on each subject. Do you think that would be too much content to try & get on one page? Should I break it down to a more finite 5-7 links to high quality articles per page, or create basically this monster guide that links to all these different articles I'll create. Looking forward to getting your opinion, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chris.kent0 -
Http and https duplicate content?
Hello, This is a quick one or two. 🙂 If I have a page accessible on http and https count as duplicate content? What about external links pointing to my website to the http or https page. Regards, Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
How best to handle (legitimate) duplicate content?
Hi everyone, appreciate any thoughts on this. (bit long, sorry) Am working on 3 sites selling the same thing...main difference between each site is physical location/target market area (think North, South, West as an example) Now, say these 3 sites all sell Blue Widgets, and thus all on-page optimisation has been done for this keyword. These 3 sites are now effectively duplicates of each other - well the Blue Widgets page is at least, and whist there are no 'errors' in Webmaster Tools am pretty sure they ought to be ranking better than they are (good PA, DA, mR etc) Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure 🙂 So - to questions/thoughts. 1 - Is it enough to try and get creative with on-page changes to try and 'de-dupe' them? Kinda tricky with Blue Widgets example - how many ways can you say that? I could focus on geographical element a bit more, but would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally. 2 - I could, i guess, no-index, no-follow, blue widgets page on 2 of the sites, seems a bit drastic though. (or robots.txt them) 3 - I could even link (via internal navigation) sites 2 and 3 to site 1 Blue Widgets page and thus make 2 blue widget pages redundant? 4 - Is there anything HTML coding wise i could do to pull in Site 1 content to sites 2 and 3, without cloaking or anything nasty like that? I think 1- is first thing to do. Anything else? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Capote0