Crawl Diagnostics Summary - Duplicate Content

[ChiragNirmal]

Hello SEO Experts,

I am a developer at www.bowanddrape.com and we are working on improving the SEO of the website. The SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostics Summary shows that following 2 URL have duplicate content.

http://www.bowanddrape.com/clothing/Tan+Accessories+Calfskin+Belt/50_5142

http://www.bowanddrape.com/clothing/Black+Accessories+Calfskin+Belt/50_5143

Can you please suggest me ways to fix this problem?

Is the duplicate content error because of same "The Details", "Size Chart" and "The Silhouette" and "You may also like" ?

Thanks,

Chirag

[Dr-Pete]

It's tough, because these variations/customizations are legitimately what you do. My gut feeling, though, is that 80K (I'm seeing 90K with a site: search) indexed pages is just too much for your current link profile. It doesn't mean you'll get in trouble, but it could mean that your ranking power is spread far too thin.

While it's not a decision I'd take lightly, I do think there's an advantage here to either:

(1) Consolidating variations under one URL

(2) Having multiple URLs, but possibly using rel=canonical (I think that's your best bet) to focus Google on one parent URL for each product

[ChiragNirmal]

Dr. Peter, Thanks for the useful insight, right now google web master tool shows that 82,563 pages on our website are in google's index, but sadly none are getting any direct traffic from google search results. We are "design your own dress company" so each "product" can have 1000s of variations, most are similar to google, but not to the end-user. So I think what you are saying is that consolidating all variations of 1 product to 1 page could result in more power on the single product page. Can you please confirm?

[Dr-Pete]

I'm gonna disagree mildly. It is common to have color variation pages, and it is perfectly useful to end-users. So, you're not doing anything wrong, in that sense. However, these pages don't look very different to Google (minor variations in title and content), and so we do flag them as near duplicates because Google might consider them "thin". At large scale, that could dilute your ranking ability.

If you have 100s or 1000s of these pages and a relatively weak link profile, it might be worth considering canonical tags here. The trade-off is that you would consolidate your ranking power, but one variation would fall out of search results. So, it really depends not only on the scope of the problem, but the strength of the site, and how important these long-tail color-based searches are to your current traffic. There's no one-sized-fits-all answer.

[ChiragNirmal]

Thanks Eyepaq. I can keep it as is, but I will try to make them more brown or black by adding brown or black to the The Details and the The Silhouette.

[ChiragNirmal]

Thanks. I will try to make them more unique.

[PaddyDisplays]

At the moment the pages are too similar so are coming up as dups, (they also will most likely compete with each other in the serps too)

My advice would be either make them more different content wise,  or have one page that covers both terms (I would guess they would be long tail terms anyway, so that might be the best option)

using canonical links it telling google they are the same page content wise and which is the "master page" to show in the serps

[eyepaq]

In this case you can let those be as they are...

No harm to the website or pages for this "issue" - it is a common think for this type of color / type differences and you should not add rel canonical or redirect it s you need them both in the search pages.

There is no down side of having those like this.

Cheers.

[ChiragNirmal]

Thanks for the Reply Bryan. I have used canonical links at other places on the website, where the pages are same.

I want to make the 2 pages so that I can attract users both user searching for black belt as well as brown bag. Would adding canonical links help me in doing that, or am I thinking of this in the wrong way?

[Bryan_Loconto]

You need to add a canonical tags to let search engines know that the content is almost identical.

here is an awesome post to get you all set up: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps