Duplicity Problems - What to do with similar products in e-commerce?
-
Hello,
I have an eCommerce website with hundreds of similar products. On some occasions, besides for their measurements they are completely identical.
The titles are kept different by using the stock reference and the meta descriptions also use their measurements.
However, I'm gettingDuplicate Page Content errors by the MOZ crawler.
This is more than understandable since the products are very similar -
WHAT SHOULD I DO???I noticed a similar situation in BlueNile (the diamond ecommerce site) - They have numerous almost identical pages, see example:
http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02424873
http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02430168
For some reason, they did on each page a canonical to it's self...
I wanted to add...
It is impossible to add different descriptive texts due to the amount of products and to the rapidness they are sold (each product is unique - similar to the diamonds in the BlueNile example).
-
Dear Cyrus,
I completely agree that there is no good and added value with the stock id and measurements for Google but I felt like I had no choice.
I didn't want to start putting canonical between the pages because every other day an item is sold and then I would need to change the canonical to a similar existing item.
Are you saying that when a page makes a canonical to himself Google does not index it? Or treats it as a non original page (a copied page) even if I don't specify from where it is copied?
Please see the following question I asked that is about this matter and got a different response: http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-there-a-reason-to-put-a-canonical-to-yourself-interesting-case
Thanks
-
First, let me explain the SEOmoz duplicate content errors. These are issued anytime the HTML of a page is 95% similar to another page (this means the entire code, not just the text). It sounds like this is what is happening in your case.
Blue Nile solves this dilemma with the canonical tag. They are basically telling the search engines to consolidate all the pages into one for ranking purposes. The downside of this is that any page that doesn't point to itself isn't going to rank.
You stated that each title and description are differentiated using the "stock reference" and "measurements." The big question is... are these important for ranking? By this I mean do your customers search Google for your products by stock number and/or measurements?
If it were me, and without knowing more about your situation, I would try to consolidate your product pages as much as possible and use the canonical tag, similar to Blue Nile, on near-duplicate pages (strictly speaking, Google states the canonical tag is only for exact duplicates, but in the real world they are more flexible)
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Thanks for the reply but I am unable to create the 40% unique content.
My case is exactly like the BlueNile sample I gave on top...
These are extremely similar products but still each is unique because of slight differences (that are important to the buyers). I have thousands of products and each product is one of a kind - when it is sold - it is removed to the "sold items" section.
There is no way (and no point since each product can be sold once) to write a description to so many products that are constantly changing.
-
Your errors can be incurred for a number of reasons. You need to ensure you have a enough unique content per page, If you only have a few words or character of text related to any particular item and only a few unique words in the Title tag you will be flagged for duplication. Expand unique text where you can and ensure only Primary Brand Keywords are in the Title tag such that each page should have a majority of unique text. If your URLs are dynamic in nature investigate opportunities to make them Human Readable and in a structured format. SEOmoz has written numerous guides on URL structure. Place unique content wherever you can in images files names, alt text etc... Think minimum of 40% content differential per page including the site template. Too many links in a navigation can impact you if you have limited body content on a page.
-
It looks like on those two examples its just the table% and depth % that are different? Any way you could just combine the similar products, and just make it a option to select the different table % and depth%?
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
-
If concepts are too similar when grouping keywords what do I do ?
I will summarise and then ty to explain : When I group keyword with the keyword explorer if concepts (grouping keywords) that I find are too similar to each other how do I go about it... Ldg me know explain. When google doesn't have enough data to rank a website with content does it only use links ? Let me give you an example. If I take "title tag" as a keyword people have a lots of questions that can be answered which will create numerous concepts. However, let's take "hiking tours Italy" for example. If I go through the keyword explorer or all the other tools existing out there people don't have questions. All I find are variations or synonyms of my keyword and I group by low lexical similarity all the words are going to be very similar. I know that each variation can be grouped and considered a different concepts but writing about various concepts that mean exactly the same thing because of lack of data not very smart and useful... So in that case what does google do, does it rank a website only based on links or schema ? see that it has no way to rank it based on good quality content because of a lack of data (questions that could be answers that would lead to concepts). Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
If my products aren't showing in rich snippets, is there still value in adding product schema?
I'm adding category pages for an online auction site and trying to determine if its worth marking up the products listed on the page. All of the individual product pages have product schema, but I have never seen them show up in rich snippets likely due to the absence of the price element and the unique nature of the items. Is there still value in adding the product schema even if the items won't show in rich snippets? Also, is it possible the product schema will help optimize for commerce related keywords such as [artist name] + for sale?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Haleyb350 -
How important is it to rank for a product category?
We make a product in a category of products -- let's say "donuts". There are really only 4 major donut companies (lots of artisanal donuts out there, but they're not really competitive yet). One of our competitors has systematically achieved top rank for "donut" and lots of adjacent keywords like "donuts" and "buy donuts". My question is, does their success ranking for the product category keyword "donut" influence their success ranking for long-tail keywords like "powdered donuts" and "tastiest donuts"? Or, to flip that question, should we try to compete for "donut" before worrying about "decadent delicious donuts"? Other factors: In terms of search volume, as you would expect, "donut" sees 10 to 1000 times as many searches as most of the other keywords adjacent to it. We can definitely compete for "donut" -- just trying to figure out if doing so should be our top priority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Migrating e-commerce platform (same domain). Do I need to be concerned about these changes?
We are moving a domain from oscommerce to prestashop.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
We will setup 301 redirects for each page and have made sure that new platform is following SEO best practices. I read a lot that it is critical to keep changes to a minimum when migrating to a new domain, but is this also critical when migrating just to a new e-commerce platform (same domain)? Change of URL is unavoidable, but what about these other changes below? Would you be very concerned about doing them at the same time, or rather would you do them some time after the migration? title tag (about 30% of text in title tag will be different) meta description tag (more customized and varied meta description than before) h1 (expanding product name with some relevant keywords for a number of products) additional table with product features (additional content in product pages) adding additional products to store moving to https instead of http Product descriptions and product images and category descriptions will remain the same. Replicating title tag, title description and h1 from old site would actually imply quite a lot of additional work at this point and we would have to make the change anyway at a later point, so if it is not a major risk I would prefer to do it in one go. Any thoughts?0 -
WordPress Duplicate URLs?
On my site, there are two different category bases leading to the exact same page. My developer claims that this is a common — and natural — occurrence when using WordPress, and that there's not a duplicate content issue to worry about. Is this true? Here's an example of the correct url. and... Here's an example of the same exact content, but using a different url. Notice that one is coming from /topics and the other is coming from /authors base. My understanding is that this is bad. Am I wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonMOZ1 -
Product Syndication and duplicate content
Hi, It's a duplicate content question. We sell products (vacation rental homes) on a number of websites as well as our own. Generally, these affiliate sites have a higher domain authority and much more traffic than our site. The product content (text, images, and often availability and rates) is pulled by our affiliates into their websites daily and is exactly the same as the content on our site, not including their page structure. We receive enquiries by email and any links from their domains to ours are nofollow. For example, all of the listing text on mysite.com/listing_id is identical to my-first-affiliate-site.com/listing_id and my-second-affiliate-site.com/listing_id. Does this count as duplicate content and, if so, can anyone suggest a strategy to make the best of the situation? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin0 -
How to deal with duplicates on an e-commerce website
Hi guys, So we have an e-commerce website and we have some products that are exactly the same but come in different colours. Lets say for example we have a Samsonite Chronolite and this bag comes in 55cm, 65cm and 75cm variations. The same bag also may come in 4 different colours. The bags are the same and therefore have the same information besides maybe the title tag varying due to the size and colour. But the descriptions are the same. How do I avoid Google thinking I am duplicating pages or have duplicated pages. Google things we have duplicated when the scenario is as I have explained. Any suggestions? Best regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iBags2