Creating a product per size causing duplicate content problems?

[EmdeS]

I have an e-commerce site and in order to receive a listing for each size and color in Google Merchant, I've created a new product for each size and color. The problem is that since I did this, the canonical tags aren't correct and there isn't a way to change them manually with the platform I'm on. I feel like this is one of the main reasons I've been dropping in the rankings. Should I delete all duplicate products? The system will take care of canonical tags automatically when creating a new size/color within the system (how it's supposed to be created) but the canonical tags become messy when I duplicate a product and edit the size/color to create a "whole new product".

Here is an example of what I'm referring to:

http://www.carbonconnection.com/search.php?search_query=nalini+rigel&x=0&y=0

(this problem actually isn't mine, it's a friend's but for the sake of simplicity and gaining a second opinion to be sure before he redoes all of his products, I'm asking as though it were my issue)

[PhilNottingham]

Hey,

so there are a number of ways to do this - but the essence of the process has to be about providing Google with a CSV which has all of the sizing/colour information as separate products - while keeping the products on-site non-duplicated.

Having looked through your site, the duplicate content issue is clearly problematic - and bad for users as well as the search engines. My best suggestion for you would be to use Ajax to append sizing/colour to the products - so that the image then updates on the product page when a certain filter is applied. You can then have technically unique URLs for each permutation of the product (which you can use to populate your Google shopping feed) - but these URLs can be pointed back to the generic product URL using the rel=canonical tag.

Therefore, yes, I would recommend deleting all the duplicate products and reworking how the shopping feed relates to the on-site content.

Hope that's useful!

Thanks,

Phil

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Totally get it. we had the same issue with 1,000's of furniture listings that were slightly different with color or small style differences...but the core ski's and descriptions were exactly the same....

Delete the duplicate products or figure out a way to make some substantial unique content for the other products.

Hope this helps.