Multiple listings for the same product - how to avoid duplication?
-
Hi everyone,
We are working on an e-commerce site that has three different physical stores that each hold different products in stock. A listing is created on the website for each product in each location but if the same product is in all three stores the images and description are duplicate content
We can't have one product page and tag locations to it as this would then require keeping two different stock systems updated, but is there a way to avoid the three pages being duplicates of each other?
Many thanks for the advice!
-
Hi everyone,
Thanks for the responses - we will look into this further and see what unique content we can gather for the listings.
Thanks again for the advice!
-
I would add user generated reviews and comments. Even a product q&a option is helpful. If you can get enough unique content on those pages to outweigh the duplicate content then you shouldn't have any troubles. I would recommend the user generated reviews in this instance over canonical tags because it will prevent the pages from ranking. You are basically telling Google that one of those pages is the authoritative one, which will prevent he others from ranking. The duplicate content is the same way however, unless there is something uniquely valuable on those pages. In this case, customer reviews would solve both problems. There is nothing more valuable to a searcher than hearing what other people have to say about a product.
-
Hmm, well in my experience the larger ecommerce/brick stores usually have a single product page. They then allow you to set your store location and the stock is updated based on that user preference. E.g. If I go to walmart there is 1 product page and if I select My Store the product inventory will adjust to show if it is in stock near me.
If you cannot invest in a system like this AND the product pages are duplicate content, you'll want to set 1 product page as the canonical page to prevent duplicate content issues. I suggest adding the locations to the main product page, so users can easily view their location and inventory status - since a single product page location should rank highest in the SERPs.
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
-
Is it a good idea to publish a list of players in my industry, including competitors?
I am working with an e-commerce site that does mostly B2B sales in a very commoditized industrial product segment in which very few manufacturers sell direct. It's all done through distributors and resellers, like our site. We don't often win on price, but we do win enough SERP battles to get the visitors and provide great customer service, so we have gained a following and we do compete well for some very large orders. We list several thousand products and in a given month, visitors regularly hit over 1,000 different landing pages. While we make most money from relatively few items, most items are sold only once a year, maybe twice. It's a very longtail business, and therefore tough to do a great job optimizing all pages down the tail. So, one thing I'm doing is building out a set of resource pages with common questions, terminology and other useful bits so the site gains more traffic and authority, in the hope of boosting product pages. e.g., an in-depth category definition in the glossary could link to all the items in a category. In addition to adding content that augments product pages, I'd like to create basically a map of the whole industry, including brand name manufacturers, white label manufacturers, distributors, etc. If it's going to be a truly comprehensive list, it should include my competitors. Given that I have never found such a list, it feels like this could be a good page and earn some links. Since it's unlikely much traffic will even find that page, compared to product pages, are there potential pitfalls I should be aware of? I get the feeling if I create a page that others bookmark and visit when hunting for products in our market, we win, even if most visitors to that page won't buy from us. I've been in this industry for four years now, and it's amazing how hard it is to find some companies. Only a handful even think about SEO, since they sell through other channels. Should I link to all my competitors (which is only about a dozen) among hundreds of other industry links?
Content Development | | Mike_Sobol0 -
Multiple Domains with the same Products
Hi, I have a client with three companies selling the same products on each. Two brand sites and One which shares all the products. Currently, they are all using the same description and imagery. How damaging will this be for duplicate content? Thanks, Ashleigh
Content Development | | Ashcastle0 -
Duplicate Content & Tags
I've recently added tags to my blog posts so that related blog posts are suggested to visitors. My understanding was that my robot.txt was handling duplicate content so thought it wouldn't be an issue but after Moz crawled by site this week is reported 56 issues of duplicate content in my blog. I'm using Shopify, so I can edit the robot.txt file but is my understanding correct that if there are 2 or more tags then they will be ignored? I've searched the Shopify documents and forum and can't find a straight answer. My understanding of SEO is fairly limited. Disallow: /blogs/+
Content Development | | Tangled
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b0 -
Duplicate Content - Joint Press Releases
One of my clients posts Joint Press Releases with it's partners on their blog. The client's partner posts the exact same press release on their website. I think this must meet the Duplicate Content flag... does anyone have experience in dealing with this? Sarita
Content Development | | sarita-2201190 -
Duplicate Ttile and Duplicate Content
I'm a beginner of SEO. I have a few questions need to ask people to help. The MozPro's Crawl Diagnostics show I have a lot of duplicate titles and duplicate content. However, most duplicate titles are related to Pagination. What should I do? Also, for my duplicate content. B/c we are selling similar products,everything all most the same, only product's item number different. How can I avoid it?
Content Development | | alexsu09100 -
Will our two retail sites get hit with duplicate content?
Our retail site just rolled out a second online store. The URL is new and it is showing some of the same products from the same vendors (probably about 40% of the fist store is in the second store). Down the road, we will remove the products from the first site, however, we are keeping it for now. The products show up on both sites, with the same images, and the same descriptions and almost the same URL query string. Are we going to get hit with any penalties due to duplicate content?
Content Development | | klmarketing0 -
Best way to resolve duplicate content issue?
Not sure about what to do about this - I have a client who has a ton of pages (around 1200) which are all City specific pages, for long-tail search. These are all written with paragraphs in the format such as: Order to [City] today. So every page has essentially the same content. The site also only has 1562 pages, so with 1200 of them being City-specific same-content pages, that can't be good. However the problem is that these pages still rank very well (usually Position 1 or 2) for the terms they're targeting, and bring in enough traffic and revenue to justify their purpose. We also have Country specific pages, and these are all with unique content, rather than the scripted content on the City pages. So for example, for Italy we might have: Italy Page (Unique Content) Rome (Duplicate Content) Milan (Duplicate Content) Venice (Duplicate Content) etc. (Duplicate Content) For a low traffic country (Austria), we tried to 301 the City pages to the Country page, but that only resulted in us seeing a drop in search results for the city keywords, from (usually) Position 1 to more like Page 3 or 4, so quite a drop. So, without writing 1200 pages worth of unique content, what would your advice be?
Content Development | | TME_Digital0 -
Duplicate content across multiple e-commerce sites
Hi, This may have been discussed here before though I couldn't find a definitive answer, but I was wondering what the best practice for having multiple e-commerce sites with some of the same products on both is. If Site A has 200 products, and Site B has 300 products, and 50 overlap, do they absolutely have to have unique product descriptions? The descriptions have already been rewritten to be different from the manufacturer's description, but do they need to be changed again? Or should the 50 products only be listed on one site or the other? Sites like csnstores.com seem to have the same descriptions as the subsidiary sites that they have, but maybe they have different sidebars/footers/etc which make the content considered original?
Content Development | | nks20120