Ecommerce Site - Duplicate product descriptions & SKU pages
-
Hi
I have a couple of questions regarding the best way to optimise SKU pages on a large ecommerce site.
At the moment we have 2 landing pages per product - one is the primary landing page with no SKU, the other includes the SKU in the URL so our sales people & customers can find it when using the search facility on the site. The SKU landing page has a canonical pointing to the primary page as they're duplicates.
Is this the best way? Or is it better to have the one page with the SKU in the URL?
Also, we have loads of products with the very similar product descriptions, I am working on trying to include a unique paragraph or few sentences on these to improve the content - how dangerous is the duplicate content within your own site?
I know its best to have totally unique content, but it won't be possible on a site with thousands of products and a small team. At the moment I am trying to prioritise the products to update.
Thank you
-
Hi,
Yes we use the SKU's on the other pages too. Thanks for everyone's feedback
-
Thanks, I'll set up some tests to see if this proves anything either way
Thanks
-
Hmmmm, not sure they will be ranked better, especially if they already have canonical permanent pages.
Why not use the permanent URLs in the emails also. They will look neater too for the end user and SERPS as the
www.yourdomain.com/storage-boxes/niceday-economy-archive-boxes
Looks better than
www.yourdomain.com/storage-boxes/46546545021.php etc You could always try a 301 redirect for the SKU pages so they point to the nice URL pages.
-
Also just to add, with regard to product pages - we link to the SKU page in email marketing & these URL's with the SKU are what users can find when searching in the onsite search facility.
As the urls with the SKU's will get more traffic & active users through other mediums, could this affect how Google rates them?
With regard to internal links we link the the permanent URL and not the SKU URL however
-
These are really the only two I am aware of for actual page content over meta etc. Other Mozzers may have some additional tools they could share... Good luck
-
Great thank you.
Do you know of any good internal duplicate content checkers? I am looking at copyscape or siteliner.
Thanks
-
In that case, if you can I would definitely try and create some unique content for these category pages, I understand it can be difficult when talking about boxes when they all kind of do the same thing. Storage boxes, moving boxes, cardboard boxes, plastic boxes, containers.... what do they all do? they store and hold things right!.
I used to work for a large national office supplies company so know your pain, but a little extra content may help make a difference if you really need a particular category page to rank better against your competitors in what is already a very difficult and competitive area.
-
Great thanks for your input.
With regard to the duplicate content, it's not so much on these pages which are canonicalised, it's more so on ranges of products under separate URLs. e.g. Storage boxes
A lot of the ranges are so similar, that the product description points are the same and I wanted to include some unique text - if it's worth doing
Thanks!
-
By canonicalising the SKU page to your intended landing/product page I think you are doing the best option for your situation, that is providing the URL features the product name etc. You seem to be very clued up and by the sounds of it doing everything right, I would not think that people in general would search for a SKU so having the other page as the dominant authority page is probably best.
However, as an option rather than having two pages surely you could have just one and have the search facility on your site pull back the landing page based in the SKU as a filterable/searchable element.
That way you would not need to have multiple pages and have to create double the unique content as you would only have once page to look after.
As for the similar pages, I agree adding some unique content to help differentiate them would help.
Hope that helps
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
-
Webshop landing pages and product pages
Hi, I am doing extensive keyword research for the SEO of a big webshop. Since this shop sells technical books and software (legal books, tax software and so on), I come across a lot of very specific keywords for separate products. Isn't it better to try and rank in the SERP's with all the separate product pages, instead of with the landing (category) pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
4000 new duplicate products on our ecommerce site, potential impact?
Hello, We've currently got 9500 products live on our site at the moment with ~2000 in this category that we're adding the new products in. All of these products we're adding are coming from a site that we own and we're trying to expand the range on our site (the 9500 product site has a lot more visitors than the 4000 product site). However, all these products imported I believe are atleast duplicates from the 4000 product site, but the first ones I have seen (500) are manufacturer duplicates. What issues are we potentially going to run in to? Just for extra information: We have no control over canonical/noindex/robots etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Huge e-commerce site migration - what to do with product pages?
My very large e-commerce client is about to undergo a site migration in which every product page URL will be changing. I am already planning my 301 redirect process for the top ~1,000 pages on the site (categories, products, and more) but this will not account for the more than 1,000 products on the site. The client specified that they don't want to implement much more than 1,000 redirects so as to avoid impacting site performance. What is the best way to handle these pages without causing hundreds of 404 errors on site migration day? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Duplicate content on sites from different countries
Hi, we have a client who currently has a lot of duplicate content with their UK and US website. Both websites are geographically targeted (via google webmaster tools) to their specific location and have the appropriate local domain extension. Is having duplicate content a major issue, since they are in two different countries and geographic regions of the world? Any statement from Google about this? Regards, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Depth of Links on Ecommerce Site
Hi, In my sitemap, I have the preferred entrance pages and URL's of categories and subcategories. But I would like to know more about how Googlebot and other spiders see a site - e.g. - what is classed as a deep link? I am using Screaming Frog SEO spider, and it has a metric called level on it - and this represents how deep or how many clicks away this content is.. but I don't know if that is how Googlebot would see it - From what Screaming Frog SEO spider software says, each move horizontally across from Navigation is another level which visually doesnt make sense to me? Also, in my sitemap, I list the URL's of all the products, there are no levels within the sitemap. Should I be concerned about this? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
How to Optimize Product Page for Better Ranking in Google?
Today, I was searching for product page SEO on Google for better optimization of product pages and category level pages. I want to introduce about my website structure. Root category: http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor Sub category: http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas End level category: http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas Product page: http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas-california-umbrella-slpt758-f13-red.html I'm doing link building for sub category & end level category page. But, I'm not able to do inbound marketing for product level URLs due to resource problem. But, I have checked that... There are many competitors who are rank well with long trail keyword... I'm selling same product but not ranking well... What is reason behind it? I don't know... Just look at Olefin Red Patio Umbrella search result. I want to rank in top 3 with this kind of long trail keywords... I have made study of following video and article. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ecommerce-seo-making-product-pages-into-great-content-whiteboard-friday http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/in-search-of-the-perfect-seo-product-page/ I have done all things which were described by them... But, I'm still waiting for good ranking...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
SEOMOZ duplicate page result: True or false?
SEOMOZ say's: I have six (6) duplicate pages. Duplicate content tool checker say's (0) On the physical computer that hosts the website the page exists as one file. The casing of the file is irrelevant to the host machine, it wouldn't allow 2 files of the same name in the same directory. To reenforce this point, you can access said file by camel-casing the URI in any fashion (eg; http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm). This does not bring up a different file each time, the server merely processes the URI as case-less and pulls the file by it's name. What is happening in the example given is that some sort of indexer is being used to create a "dummy" reference of all the site files. Since the indexer doesn't have file access to the server, it does this by link crawling instead of reading files. It is the crawler that is making an assumption that the different casings of the pages are in fact different files. Perhaps there is a setting in the indexer to ignore casing. So the indexer is thinking that these are 2 different pages when they really aren't. This makes all of the other points moot, though they would certainly be relevant in the case of an actual duplicated page." ****Page Authority Linking Root Domains http://www.agi-automation.com/ 43 82 http://www.agi-automation.com/index.html 25 2 http://www.agi-automation.com/Linear-escapements.htm 21 1 www.agi-automation.com/linear-escapements.htm 16 1 http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm 30 3 http://www.agi-automation.com/pneumatic-grippers.htm 16 1**** Duplicate content tool estimates the following: www and non-www header response; Google cache check; Similarity check; Default page check; 404 header response; PageRank dispersion check (i.e. if www and non-www versions have different PR).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AGIAutomation0