Duplicate Product BUT Unique Content -- any issues?
-
We have the situation where a group of products fit into 2 different categories and also serve different purposes (to the customer).
Essentially, we want to have the same product duplicated on the site, but with unique content and it would even have a slightly different product name. Some specifications would be redundant, but the core content would be different.
Any issues?
-
Great input -- and #2 is exactly what we are planning. This all came up because of User Experience and I wanted to confirm we were not missing anything from the on-site technical seo end.
Really we're talking about a different product that has the same price and possibly some of the same images and specs.
Thanks!
-
We sell a group of products that people search for in a variety of ways. They might use a formal term as the keyword, a slang term, an archaic term or an ignorant term. We have separate pages optimized for each of these as the populations of people who use these various terms range from hillbillies, to average people, to geezers like me and on to industry professionals.
-
Hi SEOPA
A good question. I can see two main options for you;
**1) **Have 1 physical home in a chosen category on your website for the product. List the product in the other category though point the URL of the menu item/link to the other category where it physically sits. So 2 separate listings for the product, though only 1 physical landing page for it. No duplicate content issues here, simply an extra navigation path which can benefit usability as the product fits within more than 1 category.
An example that I can relate to your question with regards to this option; on a site that I work with, we have 'buy to let insurance' under a property category and 'landlords insurance' within a business category. It's the same product, with the business category listing pointing to where the page actually sits, which is within the property category. This benefits visitors as the product applies to both property insurance and business insurance, this method aids user experience & easy navigation.
**2) **You've kind of answered this one already. The 'similar' product would have a Different Name within each category, with unique content. The product would be geared towards different audiences, so essentially, two different products both with unique content. So long as the navigation is clear and obvious for your visitors as to which one to view, I can't see any issues with this, other than page maintenance (am guessing there would be changes to make to both pages from time to time as the product changes/develops).
With this second method, you could potentially gear each product page towards different primary keywords, if indeed that's appropriate to do so.
- So either option can work well. Focus on the User Experience first and foremost, get that right, then optimize your chosen option for search.
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
-
Different content = smooth sailing. Make sure that your meta content is also different and you're safe.
-
No issues as long as it is done properly.
Let's say the product is an "energy booster". You make a web page and market the product as such. Now this same product is also marketed as a "weight loss" pill. Both products have the identical ingredients, manufacturer and health warnings but they offer different labels, descriptions and listed benefits. These would be seen as two unique web pages if they contained unique supporting content.
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
-
Duplicate Content
Hello Moz Quick question. Can I copy and paste a paragraph of text (100 words) from my main category page into my products without hurting SEO of the category page? The content on my category page is so good I don't want to take chances as this is what I will be ranking for. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crocman0 -
Dynamic links & duplicate content
Hi there, I am putting a proposal together for a client whose website has been optimised to include many dynamic links and so there are many pages with duplicate content: only the page title, h1 and URL is different. My client thinks this isn't an issue. What is the current consensus on this? Many thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | lorraine.mcconechy0 -
I have an eCommerce Site with in some cases, 100s of versions of the same product. How do I avoid "duplicate content" without writing literally 100s of unique product descriptions for the exact same product?
For instance, one item where the only difference is the Sports Team Logo is different, etc... or It comes in a variety of color Variants. I'm using Shopify.
On-Page Optimization | | pstone291 -
Is there a way to tell Google a site has duplicated content?
Hello, We are joining 4 of our sites, into 1 big portal, and the content from each site gonna be inside this portal and sold as a package. We don't wanna kill these sites we are joining at this moment, we just wanna import their content into the new site and in a few months we will be killing them. Is there a way to tell Google to not consider the content on these small sites, so the new site don't get penalised? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | darkmediagroup0 -
Best practice to solve this Unique duplicate page content issue?
I just got Seomoz Pro (it's awesome!), and when I did a campaign for my website I discovered that I have a big issue with duplicate page content (as well as titles). The Crawl Diagnostics Summary told me I have 196 Crawl Errors Found (I had a total of 362 pages crawled on my site), and as much as 160 of these was duplicate page content. Which to me sounds like a big problem, correct me if I'm wrong (I'm very new to SEO). So our website is an ecommerce that sells greeting cards. The unique part about our platform is that we offer the customer to make a customization of the cards.
On-Page Optimization | | danielpett
Let me walk you through each step a customer takes so you fully understand: They find a card they like and visit the product page of that card (just like on any ecommerce store.) They then decide they want to buy it. There is no "Add to cart" button, they will instead click on a "customize the card" button. 3) This takes them to a step by step process of customizing the card. They change the name on the front of the greeting card so it says for example: "Happy Birthday Katy!". And then adds a personal text on the inside of the card. They then add an delivery address and when it should be delivered. After that they proceed to checkout and it's all done. This is my website (it's in Swedish): loveday.se - it will take you to a product page so that you can click the green button and see what I mean with the customization pages. Hopefully it helps even though it's in Swedish. My issue starts at the customization part of the site (the bolded step above), as I can see the permalinks in the diagnostics I got.
This step-by-step process looks exactly the same with every card in the store. Same call-to-action headline, same descriptive text etc. The only difference is a JPEG-file with the unique greeting card design. So, what is your take on this? Let me know if I was unclear about something. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.0 -
How to SEO a website that is being help back by duplicate content?
We have over 20 websites that sell property. Each website is targeted to a different country. People advertise to sell their property. The websites are not getting to page 1 for the terms we want probably because of duplication issues. If we compare one website with another country website on www.duplicatecontent.net we find it is nearly 70% between one and the other. So we trying to understand why this is. If someone wanted to sell a property in Spain we would create an advert for them but rather than putting this on the back-end of the Spain website it goes on a separate website that does on all countries. We have tried to put nofollow tags so that the country specific website gets acknowledgement of being the original website but the rankings for key-terms will not rise and the duplication % remains nearly 70%. Can anyone suggest the best way forward?
On-Page Optimization | | Feily0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Duplicate Page Title
Hi All, I'm new in SEOMoz and have some questions after I have already spend 2-3 days trying to resolve the problems identified from Crawling one of my clients websites. I get quite a lot of Duplicate Page Conntent and Page Titles warnings and trying to find a workaround through the forums and posts. I continuously get this error on most of my pages: URL: http://domain.com/benefits with the same Page but with a WWW in front URL: http://www.domain.com/benefits Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thanks, Athos
On-Page Optimization | | athosk0 -
How should I structure my product URLs?
How should I structure my product URLs for the best SEO results? Lets say my product is "American Apparel 2001". Would it be better to run the URL together or use a "-" between each word. Here are two ideas I had, but feel free to suggest others. realthread.com/products/americanapparel2001 or realthread.com/products/american-apparel-2001 Thanks for the help! Dru
On-Page Optimization | | drudalton0