Schema.org mark up to avoid duplicate issue?
-
Hey there,
I was wondering, does product's mark-up help to avoid penalization due to duplicate content?
Here is the example: one of my client doesn't supply unique content. Because the major part of the content is technical description of products made by a couple of manufactures, do you think it will help me to link the official manufacturer webpage in a schena.org product mark-up?
I know this is the right procedure to add mark-ups, but as on the pages of my client an outbound-link will show up, so I want to tell him this will be the only way to have that duplicate content without incurring in penalisation.
I'd like to give him more than one solution, as I'm pretty sure it will never supply us with unique content.
Thanks
Pierpaolo
-
I got your point of having a firm conversation about this issue, but the agency is not mine and my concern is to see the client sacking us off. That's why I'm trying to find a way to cope with this lack of content.
I'm agreed we need unique product descriptions, but how could we write original content for products such as windows, doors, furnitures, or some products for B2B like spare parts of industrial machines?
I mean writing some original piece of content for common products such as food, clothes or gadget is pretty easy, but for example, when you look for windows and doors you need to read technical specifications - in other words numbers, measurements - and benefits. We can't change numbers, we can write original content to describe benefits instead, but writing benefits won't mean mocking up facts and things. You can write about benefits of a product only when you know that specific product and the industry. IMHO when you are THE random guy who writes anything you will only produce thin content.
So far, in my career I found very hard to face clients - too many - who expect results by a touch of magic, like they have hired Harry Potter!
I got it may be even worse having every page linked to the official manufacturer page in a schema.org product mark-up, so my last move is to put down original description for the category page and forward to the client to get the approval. In this way I hope to start seeing some benefit while I am pushing them to write original content.
Thanks for the response
P
-
I bumped SEO-Buzz's answer
In practice, sometimes it's impossible to write unique product descriptions. I've worked with websites that have over 15K products, with around 5K changing every quarter. To keep on top of that you'd need an army of copywriters.
In that situation I would recommend doing the following:
1. Make sure your category / hub page content is awesome / unique / relevant. These will then be your main landing pages.
2. Pick key product sections - based on high margin / good stock availability / competitive pricing and update the product descriptions for them. If you client sees improved sales as a result, they will probably roll out this strategy to the rest of the site.
Hope that helps
George
-
If you want to avoid the duplicate content issue, you must use original content on the page. Each product needs a unique description. Any duplicate content caused by a product having slight variations like size or color should be resolved by placing rel-canonical statements on the duplicate pages to tell the search engines which is the official product page. There is no way around writing original and unique product descriptions. If your client does not provide them or pay you to write them, then you must have a firm conversation about the problems and likely results...or lack of results.
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
-
Will I be flagged for duplicate content by Google?
Hi Moz community, Had a question regarding duplicate content that I can't seem to find the answer to on Google. My agency is working on a large number of franchisee websites (over 40) for one client, a print franchise, that wants a refresh of new copy and SEO. Each print shop has their own 'microsite', though all services and products are the same, the only difference being the location. Each microsite has its own unique domain. To avoid writing the same content over and over in 40+ variations, would all the websites be flagged by Google for duplicate content if we were to use the same base copy, with the only changes being to the store locations (i.e. where we mention Toronto print shop on one site may change to Kelowna print shop on another)? Since the print franchise owns all the domains, I'm wondering if that would be a problem since the sites aren't really competing with one another. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdenPrez0 -
Potential Pagination Issue/ Duplicate content issue
Hi All, We upgraded our framework , relaunched our site with new url structures etc and re did our site map to Google last week. However, it's now come to light that the rel=next, rel=Prev tags we had in place on many of our pages are missing. We are putting them back in now but my worry is , as they were previously missing when we submitted the , will I have duplicate content issues or will it resolve itself , as Google re-crawls the site over time ?.. Any advice would be greatly appreciated? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Am I missing an issue on my website?
Are there any glaring issues that I am missing with my site? I am building links, and growing the profile but had seen a drop in rankings a couple of months ago. Is this do to a site issue or am I just missing something? www.wallybuysell.com Any help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CKerr0 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
How to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues with Google?
We have 1000s of audio book titles at our Web store. Google's Panda de-valued our site some time ago because, I believe, of duplicate content. We get our descriptions from the publishers which means a good
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen
deal of our description pages are the same as the publishers = duplicate content according to Google. Although re-writing each description of the products we offer is a daunting, almost impossible task, I am thinking of re-writing publishers' descriptions using The Best Spinner software which allows me to replace some of the publishers' words with synonyms. I have re-written one audio book title's description resulting in 8% unique content from the original in 520 words. I did a CopyScape Check and it reported "65 duplicates." CopyScape appears to be reporting duplicates of words and phrases within sentences and paragraphs. I see very little duplicate content of full sentences
or paragraphs. Does anyone know whether Google's duplicate content algorithm is the same or similar to CopyScape's? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from CopyScape's duplicate content algorithm? How much of an audio book's description would I have to change to stay away from Google's duplicate content algorithm?0 -
Does anyone have any experience using GoodRelations Snippet Generator for E-Commerce versus markup from Schema.org?
I am trying to implement Structured Data markup on a large e-commerce site that has ancient code and is not on any standard e-commerce platform. It is a Webstore we self-host that was developed for us and heavily customized. What's worse is that I don't have access to the source code. I have to somehow instruct our IT Director how and where to place everything. So I'm going to need to be meticulously specific. As I began wading through our code and determining where to insert code as instructed by Schema.org I ran across this on one of their pages: "This class contains derivatives of properties from the GoodRelations Vocabulary for E-Commerce, created by Martin Hepp. GoodRelations is a data model for sharing e-commerce data on the Web that can be expressed in a variety of syntaxes, including RDFa and HTML5 Microdata. More information about GoodRelations can be found at http://purl.org/goodrelations/." I went to check it out and it appears that this could be a great resource as it has a snippet generator and several "cookbooks" for adding micro data to our site. Here's a link to their snippet generator: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/ However, with a catalog of 5,000 SKUs, needless to say we aren't going to plug in our products into this generator one-by one. Has anyone here successfully used GoodRelations to help them implement micro data into a large E-commerce site that isn't a standard platform (not Magento, WP, Joomla or Volusion) ?? I would be very greatful to anyone who can share their experiences and or make suggestions on how we might best proceed. Thanks! Dana
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Org & edu citations or links
One of my clients is a physician and I have achieved excellent SERP positioning for multiple targeted terms, but need to build a bit more domain authority in hopes of climbing one or two more positions and bumping a strong local competitor. I am segueing into the the off-page SEO work and was wondering if anyone would be willing to share their favorite search queries or tips for seeking-out potential citation or back link sources on .org or .edu sites which are relevant to my client's area of expertise? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0