Duplicate Content for e-commerce help

[YNWA]

Hi.

I know I have duplicate content issues and Moz has shown me the issues on ecommerce websites.

However a large number of these issues are for variations of the same product. For example a blue, armani t-shirt can be found on armani page, t-shirt page, armani t-shirt page and it also shows links for the duplicates due to sizing variations.

Is it possible or even worthwhile working on these issues?

Thanks

[YNWA]

Thanks.

We have issues with our filter at present (it is Ajax I think) as it doesn't recognise when a variation is out of stock. Which pretty much makes the point of a filter useless.

We need it tweaking which our web team are trying to do.

Thanks

[David-Kley]

Doing the canonical URL's will help with this.

If your cart system allows this, you could also have the sizing done through javascript as a variable, so that it does not change the URL for the different filters. This way you can still pass the values through for your store, but not have 5 different pages for every product.

[GPainter]

They should but its always worth double checking.

[YNWA]

I can put a Canonical URL on the product using Yoast. So I presume that all other variants of that product will go to that URL?

[GPainter]

its a tag that sits on your webpage i'm sure you can get a plugin for Wordpress to do it, Yoast might do it. worst case web dev guy can do it pretty easy.

I also think this one would do the trick but i recommend doing a little research (i dont endorse this particular one) - http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

[YNWA]

Yeah that was the lines I was going down.

I just wasnt sure if it would be a big issue. The sizes/colours are all under a master product anyway so all point to the same URL.

Will my web guy do this or can I do within Wordpress/Webmaster tools?

[GPainter]

Hello,

What you want is rel=canonical tag:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

what this will do it tell Google (or other search engines) that the product is a duplicate so what would do is tell Google that the Armani t-shirt is the original and put the tag on the colours pointing back to the Armani t-shirt page. then you won't have duplicates because any value will be passed to the original. The only minor problem is the other won't be indexed but if its just a colour issue this is not normally a problem.

I hope that helps and good luck!

(just edited the links to be links!)