E-commerce site product descriptions and duplicate content
-
Hi everyone.
I'm developing an e-commerce site using Prestashop and concerned about the issue of duplicate content among product descriptions. My main concerns are:
-
If there are 500 or more products and those product descriptions are obtained from a manufacturer or supplier's website hence running into external duplicate content issues.
-
Internal duplicate content is also an issue, if there are multiple similar products and each product has the same description across several pages.
What would be the best approach to eliminate the possibility of incurring a duplicate content penalty due to similar product descriptions?
I've already considered the suggestion of noindex-ing the complete range of products to help protect from duplicate content penalties and having unique articles written in the site blog discussing products instead linking to certain products on the site.
Another consideration I had was noindex-ing all product pages except pages for featured products in the store and rewriting descriptions for a set amount of those featured products regularly (this will still have the problem of internal duplicate content across pages if similar product descriptions are rewritten).
The product range is intended to be very large so I'm really seeking an alternative solution from the insane task of rewriting many product descriptions. Any suggestions to make SEO work efficient are very much welcome and appreciated.
Thank you!
-
-
Hi David,
That was one of the options we were considering and keeping the remaining 80% out of the index to ensure we wouldn't be penalised for DC because for I know for a fact in most cases if we use the content provided ny the manufacturer we will be stumped for DC, as every other Joe is using it.
Thanks for your input.
-
Have you considered scaling the task, rewriting perhaps the top 20% of products to begin with?
It is a massive undertaking, but I think you'll find it'll be worth it.
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
-
Stolen Content reposted on other sites. How does this affect ranking?
Visitors often copy and paste my content and post it elsewhere... on Facebook, on Tumblr, on forums and sometimes on competing websites... but they don't link to me. How does Google treat this duplicated content? What is the best way to handle it? File DCMA claims or ask them for a link?
On-Page Optimization | | brianflannery0 -
I'm planning the structure of a Car Parts e-commerce site and...
Hi all, As the title says, I am redeveloping a website for a client who sells car parts. The market is saturated with competition and 9 times out of 10, www.eurocarparts.com appears within the top 5 SERPS when searching for the same things that my clients' website sells. Now I know it will be very difficult to compete with the likes of these sites but given time (plenty of time) you never know so I have dissected Euro Car Parts website for many hours to look at their internal link structure and so my question is related to this area. My site only sells car parts for 4 car manufacturers. The left hand "shop" navigation menu will list the categories in which the shop sells products for e.g: Air Filters
On-Page Optimization | | yousayjump
Break Pads
Coilovers
Dampers
Suspension etc. When you view one of those pages, there will be a form to allow the user to filter down to their particular make/model of car etc. Now when I search for "Air Filters" in Google, the results come back as nearly 40 million. If I prefix that search term with a car manufacturer name i.e. "Audi Air Filters" the number drops down to 8 million - quite a difference!
So my thinking was to do the following but I wanted to see if you guys think I am barking up the wrong tree or if this is a good approach: Create pages for my 4 car manufacturers for each "shop category" listing all the products I have in those categories for the manufacturer along with well written unique, relevant content, ie:- Audi Air Filters
Audi Break Pads
Audi Coilovers
Audi Suspension ... this would allow me to target the slightly long-tailed version of "Air Filters" as I now have a page for "Audi Air Filters". This would then mean when users click the "Air Filters" link from my left hand category menu, I would need to ensure that those pages were not indexed by the search engines as they would essentially be showing the same subset of products but with the title of the page being "Air Filters". I hope I have explained myself enough for you to understand my question. Ultimately I want to know if my approach is a typical one when knowing that even attempting to target "air filters" with a new website is going to be a lost cause - I need to try and get some of the lower hanging fruit. Thank you for reading.0 -
Add content as blog post or to product pages?
Hi, We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product. The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless. Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
On-Page Optimization | | azu25
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product. I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages). From what I can see, here are the pros and cons: Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership.. Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords.. I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks! [EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...0 -
Duplicate content
Are images considered duplicate content too? Example:
On-Page Optimization | | BridalHotspot
I've got a size chart on each my lingerie pages. All written content is unique but I'm using the same chart for all those pages.0 -
Copyscape Duplicate Content Ownership Question
We have a site that has had its content copied verbatim to numerous other sites and articles. We were advised to change our content but the content is originally ours. Does google take that into account before they apply duplicate penalties? And shouldn't copyscape be able to show this information in their reports? It just doesnt seem right that the originating author would have to change content because everyone else is stealing it. Any clarification on this?
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
Duplicate content with a trailing slash /
Hi, I 've pages like this: A) www.example.com/file/ B) www.example.com/file Just two questions: Does Google see this as duplicate content? Best to 301 redirect B to A? Many thanks Richard PS I read previous threads re the subject, it sounded like there was a bug in SEOMoz but I was not absolutely clear. Apologies if this is going over old ground.
On-Page Optimization | | Richard5550 -
Localised content/pages for identical products
I've got a question about localising the website of a nationwide company. We're a small dance school with nationwide (40 cities) coverage for around 40 products. Currently, we have one page for each product (style of dance), and one page for each city; the product pages cover keywords like 'cheerleading dance class' while the city pages target the 'london dance classes'-type keywords. To make 'localised product pages', I feel like we should make a page for every city/product combo 'London cheerleading classes' - but that seems like a nightmare for both writing sexy & original content, and link building/social stats. The other thing I can think of (which I refuse to do because it would look stupid & flag the page as keyword stuffed) is filling the page with the keyword phrases which are appropriate for every city. Is there another way to let google know 'this page is appropriate for these cities...'? We do currently list the cities a product is available in, but it doesn't seem to help local rankings very much. Would this just be a link building job, using hyper-targeted anchor texts (inc. city names) for each product? How do the pro's tackle this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | AlecPR0 -
Strategies for revising my duplicate content?
New to SEO and SEOmoz. I tried searching for this first and I'm sure it's on here but I could not find it. I have a site that markets fishing charters in a few dozen cities. Up to now I was relying on PPC and using each city page as a landing page of sorts. Each citiy page is very similar (there are only so many ways to write about a type of fish or fishing). What would be the recommended way for optimizing this, keeping in mind the duplicate information we provide on each page seems to be important to people. Site is www.vipfishingcharters.com Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NoahC0
