Duplicate Content / Canonical Conundrum on E-Commerce Website

[webmethod]

Hi all,

I’m looking for some expert advice on use of canonicals to resolve duplicate content for an e-Commerce site. I’ve used a generic example to explain the problem (I do not really run a candy shop).

SCENARIO

I run a candy shop website that sells candy dispensers and the candy that goes in them. I sell about 5,000 different models of candy dispensers and 10,000 different types of candy.

Much of the candy fits in more than one candy dispenser, and some candy dispensers fit exactly the same types of candy as others.

To make things easy for customers who need to fill up their candy dispensers, I provide a “candy finder” tool on my website which takes them through three steps:

1. Pick your candy dispenser brand (e.g. Haribo)

2. Pick your candy dispenser type (e.g. soft candy or hard candy)

3. Pick your candy dispenser model (e.g. S4000-A)

RESULT: The customer is then presented with a list of candy products that they can buy. on a URL like this:

Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A

All of these steps are presented as HTML pages with followable/indexable links.

PROBLEM:

There is a duplicate content issue with the results pages. This is because a lot of the candy dispensers fit exactly the same candy (e.g. S4000-A, S4000-B and S4000-C). This means that the content on these pages are the basically same because the same candy products are listed. I’ll call these the “duplicate dispensers” E.g.

Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A

Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-B

Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-C

The page titles/headings change based on the dispenser model, but that’s not enough for the pages to be deemed unique by Moz. I want to drive organic traffic searches for the dispenser model candy keywords, but with duplicate content like this I’m guessing this is holding me back from any of these dispenser pages ranking.

SOLUTIONS

1. Write unique content for each of the duplicate dispenser pages: Manufacturers add or discontinue about 500 dispenser models each quarter and I don’t have the resources to keep on top of this content. I would also question the real value of this content to a user when it’s pretty obvious what the products on the page are.

2. Pick one duplicate dispenser to act as a rel=canonical and point all its duplicates at it. This doesn’t work as dispensers get discontinued so I run the risk of randomly losing my canonicals or them changing as models become unavailable.

3. Create a single page with all of the duplicate dispensers on, and canonical all of the individual duplicate pages to that page.

e.g. Canonical: candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series

Duplicates (which all point to canonical):

candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=A

candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=B

candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=C

PROPOSED SOLUTION

Option 3.

Anyone agree/disagree or have any other thoughts on how to solve this problem?

Thanks for reading.

[max.favilli]

Yes, adwords CR would give you that answer. The budget required depends on so many factors. But you can reduce the list of KW sampling the complete list.

But at least at macro level if you discuss that with someone from your client who knows his market and his consumers you should start getting an idea.

Logic+common sense is a good start.

I would analyze that before to start changing the website.

But if you do the opposite is not that you are going to break any porcelain. Duplicate content is not like a manual penalization, as far as I know, once you fix it and google crawl the new version the ranking is updated.

[webmethod]

Thanks Max, your feedback makes complete sense.

KW volume analysis is a big job but managable, though I'm not even sure where I'd start with analysing whether people buy or not based on certain organic KWs. I'd probably have to set up Adwords campaigns and test conversion rates? Across a long tail of keywords that's going to be expensive to get statistically significant results.

Assuming that I don't have the resources to do that immediately, but that I do have a duplicate content issue (at least Moz seems to think so) am I better off "fixing" it with my proposed solution, or would you hold off until the KW analysis was done. This section of the site gets very little organic traffic at the moment as it's also a very competitive space and it doesn't have many inbound links so the risk of causing damage is low. I'm reluctant to start promoting this section and linking to it if I know there's a significant underlying duplicate content problem.

You're right about the URL too - it actually starts /Candy-Dispenser-Candies-Refills/*, I didn't think I'd get picked up on that!

Thanks,

George

[max.favilli]

As a rule of thumb I would put the category before the brand in the url structure. But...

In my opinion there's much more you should research before to take a decision.

Did you analyze your consumer behavior? What keywords are they going to type in google search box?

Are they really looking for your candy dispenser brands? Or by dispenser model names? Brand+model? Or they don't know much about candy dispensers manufacturer and models and just searching by some characteristics?

Don't be tricked by keywords volume, maybe there are a lot of searches for a brand or model, but what is their intention when searching by those terms? To buy? To find information planning to buy? To find information about a product they bought and learnt the name after making the purchase?

You should find out before to design the url structure.

And before to take a decision about how to mitigate the duplicate content risk.

What I mean is... There are characteristics of those dispensers you want to use to differentiate pages to target different keywords, and characteristics you can just put all in one page with “dispenser configurator”.

[donford]

Same scenario on our site, we have a Product Finder search that returns x results based on user criteria. My solution canonical tag the search result pages to the root page.. in my case advanced_search.php.

My thought process is this, if somebody is searching for a very specific product, I absolutely don't want them hitting a random search page, rather I want them to see my product page. This means that the search page is likely crap in the rankings and that is by design.

There is nothing wrong with trying to capitalize on the search results, but isn't that what your categories and actual product pages are for?

Hope this helps,

Don