I have an eCommerce Site with in some cases, 100s of versions of the same product. How do I avoid "duplicate content" without writing literally 100s of unique product descriptions for the exact same product?

[pstone29]

For instance, one item where the only difference is the Sports Team Logo is different, etc... or It comes in a variety of color Variants. I'm using Shopify.

[Everett]

Philip,

This page:

http://www.picnicandtailgate.com/products/reclining-camp-chair-with-mlb-logos-by-picnic-time

Should be the canonical version, referenced as such in the rel canonical tags, on these pages:

http://www.picnicandtailgate.com/products/reclining-camp-chair-with-mlb-logos-by-picnic-time?variant=1367734467
http://www.picnicandtailgate.com/products/reclining-camp-chair-with-mlb-logos-by-picnic-time?variant=1367734531
http://www.picnicandtailgate.com/products/reclining-camp-chair-with-mlb-logos-by-picnic-time?variant=1367735171

This seems to be the way you have it set up at the moment, and I would leave it like that. If your hope is to get more search traffic for team-specific searches you'll either have to rely on that one page ranking for all team variations (each team is listed in the code from the selector box so you shouldn't need to add them somewhere else on the page) OR you'll have to create unique and useful content for each one of them that doesn't follow a pattern (i.e. don't just replace the team name on each page).

Does that answer this question for you, or were there other related issues?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

If you have unique products, you should make sure your on-site SEO is unique as well.

That being said, Inflow has a great resource regarding duplicate content for ecommerce, I suggest you check it out.

Hope this helps a bit! Good luck!

[pstone29]

I do in fact have pages with all the options as well as photos that change by the user selection (seen in the link below). I was unsure of potentially being penalized by Google for breaking out each TEAM in each SPORT to have it's own page. There would be value in this as I could create Individual Team "Landing Pages". If I'm going to have to write descriptions for the same product as amany as 200+ times, it's not going to be possible.

Here's an example of a Product Page with all options:
http://www.picnicandtailgate.com/products/reclining-camp-chair-with-mlb-logos-by-picnic-time

[Hutch42]

I worked on a similar problem, we created an interstitial page for a general product and then used canonical tags to point all of the e-commerce product pages back to the interstitial page.

Ideally you would want one page where you could just select different options, but depending on your technology that may not be possible.

[Mike.Bean]

1. Use as many options as possible

2. Think about your product names, name them so they're first word is different on every product. This should be possible.

Red Team Logo

Blue Team Logo

(Options are better but if you must, title it like that.)

3. It seems like a large task, but take the time to write descriptions differently. It gives you a chance to play around with many keywords and will be very worth it in the end.

Again options are going to be a big help to minimize duplicate descriptions, names and titles.