Are duplicate item titles harmful to my ecommerce site?

[goforgreen]

Hello everyone,

I have an online shopping site selling, amongst other items, candles. We have lots of different categories within the LED candles category.

One route a customer can take is homepage > LED candles > Tealights.

Within the tealights category we have 7 different products which vary only in colour. It is necessary to create separate products for each colour since we have fantastic images for each colour.

To target different keywords, at present we have different titles (hence different link texts, different URLs and different H1 tags) for each colour, for example "Battery operated LED candles, amber", "Flameless candles, red" and "LED tealights, blue".

I was wondering if different titles to target different keywords is a good idea. Or, is it just confusing to the customer and should I just stick with a generic item title which just varies by colour (eg. "LED battery candles, colour")?

If I do the latter, am I at risk of getting downranked by Google since I am duplicating the product titles/link texts/URLs/H1 tags/img ALTs? (the description and photos for each colour are unique).

Sorry if this is a little complicated - please ask and I can clarify anything...because I really want to give the best customer experience but still preserve my Google ranking.

I have attached screenshots of the homepage and categories to clarify, feel free to go on the site live too.

Thank you so much,

Pravin

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[ORob]

In my opinion, you still run a small risk of having items filtered out due to being too similar. If you feel the balance of unique content compared to duplicate is much more on the unique side - you may be ok. You may have less risk of being "penalized" compared to just filtered. Meaning your domain as a whole may not face penalty, but some of those pages still might have difficulty showing up due to being too similar for a given search.

A decent way to explore this is to do searches for phrases that might be exclusive to those pages that have similar content. Do they all show up? Then you are probably ok. How about an exact phrase match using quotes around the search query. Do some testing and see if you are hitting a filter or not.

[goforgreen]

Yes the whole copy and customer reviews are unique. The only thing that's duplicated is MOST of the title, img ALTs, img URLs, URL, H1 tag and link text throughout the site. I say most because these attributes would vary only in colour.

[ORob]

Hi Pravin,

Is there any content on these pages that makes them unique? Is there a greater portion of unique content compared to this duplicated content?

Owen

[goforgreen]

Hi Owen,

Thanks for the reply.

I meant item titles as in what I name the products in the ecommerce platform, NOT the meta titles which are unique for all my products.

If the item titles (and hence URLs, image ALTs, H1 tags etc as they are automatically set by the ecommerce platform) are duplicated (and NOT the meta titles) would it still make a difference and am I at risk of getting downranked / penalised?

Thanks again for your help,

Pravin

[ORob]

If you want to increase the chance of each unique combination being found via organic search, unique titles would be the way to go. Duplicate titles might increase the chances of Google filtering one ore more of your pages out of the search results in favor of a similar result from your site.

Another solution would be to choose the most relevant item in the set and use a canonical tag to the different color combinations. That way someone searching can find your page and decide from there if they want a different color but you wont face the duplicate content issue.