Page quantity vs no crawl errors.

[escteam]

Which one is better:

• Have a ton of pages but accept crawl errors or;

• Have a lot less pages with no crawl errors.

Let's say I have a product catalogue with 10 regular pages and 500 product pages (same page with content and title defined by url parameter like 'id').

It seems that even with a different product name, product description, price, color etc, I get dupplicate content crawl errors. I also know I could use a link tag with cannonical rel attribute to fix the crawl errors but I would lose indexing on 499 pages.

In this case is it better SEO wise to have:

• 510 pages with 499 dupplicate content crawl errors or;

• 11 pages with 0 crawl errors?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Vincent,

Great question! The reason you are getting those duplicate content errors is because of the HTML similarity of your product pages. Even though they have different title tags and content, there's not enough content differences from one page to another to fully distinguish them.

That said, Google is a bit more sophisticated at determining duplicate content, but in the age of Panda, they might view the content on these pages as "thin" In general, it's nice to have at least 250+ words of rich unique content on every page you are trying to rank for.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

In general, you don't want to canonicalize those product pages, as these would effectively drop them from the index. Instead, the ideal solution would be to add more content to those pages, above the fold, and beef up the descriptions. Even if this is unreasonable, I would prefer the duplicate content errors in this scenario than canonicalizing everything to 10 pages.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

[escteam]

I don't see why you would need those as the question was general and the example was not taken from a website. I guess the problem would apply to both:

www.italnord.com

and

www.teebotz.com

[SEOExecutive20]

Can you list your site domain?