How should I deal with "duplicate" content in an Equipment Database?

[DohenyDrones]

The Moz Crawler is identifying hundreds of instances of duplicate content on my site in our equipment database.  The database is similar in functionality to a site like autotrader.com.  We post equipment with pictures and our customers can look at the equipment and make purchasing decisions.

The problem is that, though each unit is unique, they often have similar or identical specs which is why moz (and presumably google/bing) are identifying the content as "duplicate".  In many cases, the only difference between listings are the pictures and mileage- the specifications and year are the same.

Ideally, we wouldn't want to exclude these pages from being indexed because they could have some long-tail search value.  But, obviously, we don't want to hurt the overall SEO of the site.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[RobertFisher]

I think Tom lays this out quite well and I would follow this advice.

[DirkC]

I would leave it like this especially if these pages generate long tail search traffic. Having semi-duplicate pages isn't necessarily going to hurt you (check also: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/myths-about-duplicate-content/). Check also this article https://moz.com/blog/have-we-been-wrong-about-panda-all-along) and finally Google (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en) :

"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."

If your site has enough pages with rich content & these "thin" pages have value as landing pages for your visitors don't start messing with it.

Dirk

[TomRayner]

"Ideally, we wouldn't want to exclude these pages from being indexed because they could have some long-tail search value.  But, obviously, we don't want to hurt the overall SEO of the site."

You say that, but I'm not entirely sure it's true.

I understand the theory - if you have 20 Citroen C1s listed on the site, you could potentially have 20 pages of yours ranking for relevant terms, right?

Well, unique content on those pages or not, I think it would be extremely unlikely that Google would want to present all of those results to the user.  Furthermore, if the pages expire or go "out of stock", as it were, when purchased, would Google want to rank it?

So I'm not convinced having all those pages indexed and treated as unique (whether they are or not) would result in traffic (please prove me wrong though - if you have lots of entrances to the site via organic search to those pages it'll show what I know!).

My preference, regardless of the above, would be to have a main page for your Citroen C1 products - a hub page - that then links to all the different products you have as and when they're available.

This has many advantages - you just need to focus on ranking one page in the category instead of several, you can collect all the link equity you earn to one page, you can ensure the page is well optimised for search engines and users, and the page will be evergreen - meaning your links would be too.

The short version:

Homepage > Hub Page > Product variant 1, variant 2 etc

Rank the homepage and the hub page.

Hope this helps.