How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
-
Hi,
I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind:
-Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size
-Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique
I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website.
Looking forward to your opinions and solutions.
Jeroen
-
I agree with Laura, Big Commerce, OpenCart, OSCommerce, these would all be great solutions. I think Big Commerce is the best hosted platform on the market right now. OpenCart and OSCommerce are not hosted solutions, and they are both open source so you would have to have some coding experience to get them set up.
-
I agree with Monica and Hutch. One product with product options is the best practice, but you stated that this was impossible with your current shopping cart. If most of your products have different sizes and colors, it may be worth it to switch to a different ecommerce solution. It may be costly in the short term, but you'll have greater success over the long term.
-
Adding product options is usually best practice, like Hutch said.
Using canonical tags would be the next best thing. If you have Product A that has 6 colors and subsequently you have 6 pages for product A, I would create one page with a product description and product reviews. I would make that the canonical page. For the 6 subsequent pages I would create them to mirror the first page, but only have details specific to the color on that page. Then, add the Rel = Canonical tags to those 6 pages. All of the link juice and page authority will be pointed to the main product page.
The second thing I would do is add links to the specific pages with different colors to the content on the main page. This will help users find it easier and help with overall user experience.
So, it would look something like this:
Product A - Description, Reviews, Links to all versions of product A. Fully optimized page for Product A
Product A Colors 1 - 6, Add REL=Canonical tags with Product A as the Canonical. Include descriptions specific to the individual colors. Using the canonical tags will tell the engines that your preferred page is Product A, which will help you control the negative effects of the duplicate content.
-
If the products are all but the same besides color, would you be able to implement something like amazon has, where each product is only one page and you select the color/size option within the the product framework? This way instead of having a bunch of pages that are basically the same product, all of your effort can go to one page per product.
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 this duplicate content that I should be worried about?
Our product descriptions appear in two places and on one page they appear twice. The best way to illustrate that would be to link you to a search results page that features one product. My duplicate content concern refers to the following, When the customer clicks the product a pop-up is displayed that features the product description (first showing of content) When the customer clicks the 'VIEW PRODUCT' button the product description is shown below the buy buytton (second showing of content), this is to do with the template of the page and is why it is also shown in the pop-up. This product description is then also repeated further down in the tabs (third showing of content). My thoughts are that point 1 doesn't matter as the content isn't being shown from a dedicated URL and it relies on javascript. With regards to point 2, is the fact the same paragraph appears on the page twice a massive issue and a duplicate content problem? Thanks
Technical SEO | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Assistance with High Priority Duplicate Page Content Errors
Hi I am trying to fix the high priority duplicate content URL's from my recent MOZ crawl (6 URL's) in total. Would someone from the community be able to offer some web development advice? I had reached out on the Moz Community on the main welcome page. Samantha stated that someone in web development on Moz's Q&A forum would be better suited to assist me. I took a word press class on Lynda.com, but other than that, I am a novice. I manage my site www.rejuvalon.com on Go Daddy's managed wordpress site. Thanks so much for your help! Best, Jill
Technical SEO | | justjilly0 -
Duplicate content due to numerous sub category level pages
We have a healthcare website which lists doctors based on their medical speciality. We have a paginated series to list hundreds of doctors. Algorithm: A search for Dentist in Newark locality of New York gives a result filled with dentists from Newark followed by list of dentists in locations near by Newark. So all localities under a city have the same set of doctors distributed jumbled an distributed across multiple pages based on nearness to locality. When we don't have any dentists in Newark we populate results for near by localities and create a page. The issue - So when the number of dentists in New York is <11 all Localities X Dentists will have jumbled up results all pointing to the same 10 doctors. The issue is even severe when we see that we have only 1-3 dentists in the city. Every locality page will be exactly the same as a city level page. We have about 2.5 Million pages with the above scenario. **City level page - **https://www.example.com/new-york/dentist - 5 dentists **Locality Level Page - **https://www.example.com/new-york/dentist/clifton, https://www.example.com/new-york/dentist/newark - Page contains the same 5 dentists as in New York city level page in jumbled up or same order. What do you think we must do in such a case? We had discussions on putting a noindex on locality level pages or to apply canonical pointing from locality level to city level. But we are still not 100% sure.
Technical SEO | | ozil0 -
How do I handle duplicate content of the same product in Multiple product categories?
I am building a BigCommerce store for selling framed art. Many of the pieces of art will fall in more than one product category. Let's say I have a framed print of a photograph of a western landscape. This piece of art would fit into these categories; "western", "landscape", and "photography". I would have three pages with duplicate content for just this one framed print. Will google give me less page rank due to this? Can all the link juice be given to just one of the three categories by use of rel=canonical? If so, does anyone know how to do this for a bigcommerce site? I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks, Kelly
Technical SEO | | Kelly_S0 -
Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce
Hi, My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles - The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are Products Map :: Company Name How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | frankrizzo0 -
How to prevent duplicate content in archives?
My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Mitigating duplicate page content on dynamic sites such as social networks and blogs.
Hello, I recently did an SEOMoz crawl for a client site. As it typical, the most common errors were duplicate page title and duplicate content. The client site is a custom social network for researchers. Most of the pages that showing as duplicate are simple variations of each user's profile such as comment sections, friends pages, and events. So my question is how can we limit duplicate content errors for a complex site like this. I already know about the rel canonical tag, and rel next tag, but I'm not sure if either of these will do the job. Also, I don't want to lose potential links/link juice for good pages. Are there ways of using the "noindex" tag in batches? For instance: noindex all urls containing this character? Or do most CMS allow this to be done systematically? Anyone with experience doing SEO for a custom Social Network or Forum, please advise. Thanks!!!
Technical SEO | | BPIAnalytics0 -
Long tail keywords and duplicate content (product description)
Hi <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> pro's, how are you doing these days? Hope everything is fine... Let's get down to business: I've got a little question about ecommerce sites with duplicate content (product descriptions). I'm already ranking top #1 for exact keyword matche's (did a lot of backlink work with exact keyword). That's fine. The question is: long tail keywords still getting lower results than the competitors, because they published the content first. How to beat them? What I need to do/work to outrank competitors on long tail keywords? (I really need this because almost keywords/products from my niche only have 10% of exact search's). Hope someone can give me a word of light on this! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | azaiats20