E-Commerce Site - Duplicate Content

[eugeneku]

We run an e-commerce site with about 250,000 SKUs.

Certain items, such as a micro USB car charger, will be applicable to several different phones. Example:

http://www.wirelessemporium.com/p-165787-samsung-galaxy-proclaim-illusion-sch-i110-heavy-duty-car-charger.asp

http://www.wirelessemporium.com/p-165856-sony-xperia-ion-4g-lte-att-heavy-duty-car-charger.asp

As one can imagine with so many items, unique content for each item description page can be a challenge. What would be the best way to address this on a large scale?

[eugeneku]

That's correct. We do this for all compatible products.

[CMC-SD]

If I understand correctly, you're saying that you're creating multiple SKUs for exactly the same product, and just changing the name of the product to reflect one of the phones the charger works for. Is that right?

[AgentsofValue]

hmm - I think it is what it is.  The products you're selling are things that people need, but are fundamentally not that interesting.

I think the strategy of incentivising people to leave reviews is a good start (WEbucks).  If you're able to generate enough UCG this way, you might consider not showing the same comments on both of the pages.

It looks like you're using a generic Meta description / keywords for both of the pages.  You should be able to customize this inside your templates to use something more relevant to the page.

It looks like the descriptions are shared by other sites across the web.  Ideally you could figure out a strategy generating something more unique here.  Maybe by you could find a way of highlighting some of the best comments left specifically about that particular product in question?

[SteveTheWoodsman]

250,000 SKUs is no joke.  However, I was the GM for an online distributor that had over 80,000 SKUs and they had a lot of the same problems when I got there.  However, in a few months I fixed those problems and more which led to almost doubling their sales.

The correct answer is not just SEO related but also takes a content management approach.

1st - with that many SKUs you need to trim some fat.  Focus on the top 80% of your SKUs that you sell and cut the rest (or at least hide them).  I cut the company I worked for down to almost 55k SKUs and based my decision on product age and SKU turns.

2nd - make sure your website has KILLER navigation!  With that much content you will drown your clients.  Choose less than 7 main categories and break each one of them down respectively.  And then have multiple ways to slice those categories (i.e. price, mfg, size, etc).  see http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ for an example of good organization of categories.

3rd - and this addresses your main question - correctly mark your pages for canonicalization.  There are a lot of ways to do it but I'll just point you to what Google says on their WebMaster FAQ area: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066

I hope that helps!