Canoncial tag for Similar Product Descriptions on Woocommerce

[vinylabs]

I'm looking for advice on how to handle my product description pages for my website vinylabs.com. The website sells vinyl wrap for cars and each color of vinyl (89 variations) has it's own product page. The product descriptions will all be identical except for the color description and code. All of our competitors have an identical layout, different pages for each color, and it fits the product so I don't want to depart from featuring each color as it's own page.

Here is my dilemma. I don't want to get penalized for duplicate content, however I do want individual color codes to be searchable on google. For example if you google 3M vinyl wrap M203 you'll get individual pages from the manufacturer and our competitors featuring just that color. I want our website to show up as well.

I was thinking about creating a single page that has selectable colors and sizes and then using the canonical tag to point all of my individual color code pages to that single page. However won't that hurt the ability for my individual color code pages to show in search? None of my competitors are using the canonical tag to redirect to a different page.

Any advice welcome! Thank you for your time.

[BradsDeals]

I honestly think that Google is aiming to be smart enough to understand that a red widget, green widget and blue widget are really all the same thing in different colors, and that at some point in the near future that kind of nuance will kill the need for 89 mostly duplicate pages. That feels really, really thin to me.

As for getting the words on the page in a way that isn't utter spam, what about serving a photo caption along with a color selection? Making sure your images are appropriately named like "red-widget.png", working the colors in in such a way that they're providing useful context to the image being displayed?

[vinylabs]

That's a really great point, I've been contemplating this as well. Would having all of the different color codes as a drop down be very effective for having those color versions show up in search when somebody googled the color code? Or would it be more effective for SEO to come up with 89 different pages with variations on keywords?

[BradsDeals]

Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's the best way to go. Here are my thoughts.

• Doing the same thing as everyone else won't help you stand out.
• One page with multiple color options inherently has more opportunity to be robust content-wise.
• One page with multiple options means all links to that product are pointing at a single page instead of being diffused across too many pages.
• One page with multiple options may actually be a better user experience since the user then doesn't need to leave the page to explore them.
• No more worries about duplicate content!
• Focus on ranking one completely killer page instead of scattering your efforts across lots of so-so pages.
• If you have one amazing page that ranks well for all colors, do the individual pages need to rank at all? Scary to think about not worrying about whether or not a page ranks, but honestly, sometimes that holds people back. If focusing on all means ranking none, is that actually worthwhile?

I honestly think this is worth exploring.

[LauraSultan]

Yes, you are right that Google has included this caveat about deceptive and manipulative practices that relate to duplicate content, but that is not a "duplicate content penalty."  Merely having the same description for product variations will not get you penalized. That's a common issue with ecommerce websites and isn't the sort of black hat tactic that will incur the wrath of Google.

[vinylabs]

Thank you for the response Laura! This is all great info.

I just started building this website last week so I'm not surprised nothing is appearing in Google Search, I'm not anywhere close to finished. I haven't written the product descriptions yet, but I was planning on writing unique content.  I will be writing everything myself from scratch, my concern was duplicate content of my own writing on each page.

You say there is no "penalty" for duplicate content however the below statement is directly from google (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en)

"In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search result"  I assume then I can take them at their word that this penalty is only in rare cases of overt manipulation correct?

[MikeRoberts]

I agree with Laura on this one. If the content of each page is 99% the same as each other (and/or 99% the same as what all your competitors are doing) then you're not going to rank and be found for these products; especially if there is an older, more established brand in your industry. Your best option is really to fill out those pages with more unique content. It can be daunting but you can get them to rank and be found with just a little bit of work. (Trust me on this, I used to work for an ecommerce that had a few hundred products [each with 7-12 micro-variations] that were legitimately the same thing as each other but with a slight color or texture difference at best... you'd be amazed how many ways there are to sell the same thing without duplicating copy.)

Throw together a landscape report, get an idea of all the various core terms in your industry, lay out a plan for what pages will use what term(s) and how, and if you don't have an in-house content writer it wouldn't hurt to look into hiring one (even part time) to get 89+ pages banged out for your site.

[LauraSultan]

You are correct in your suspicion. If you canonicalize all of your color pages to the single page, that single page will probably be the only one to show up in search.

The internal duplication isn't really your biggest problem. The bigger problem is external duplicate content. You have the same or very similar product descriptions as other websites.  You can't compete with established websites selling the same products with the same product descriptions unless you have an aggressive and well-rounded digital marketing plan. Start by adding unique content to the product pages, which will help with both the internal and external duplicate content.

I also want to address your concern that the website will be penalized for duplicate content. There is no duplicate content "penalty."  Rather, when evaluating pages with duplicate content for a given search query, Google will choose the top page(s) to display in SERPs and filter out the rest.

Only a tiny fraction of the pages on your site are actually appearing in Google search results. A search of "site:vinylabs.com" only shows 5 pages in the results. You may have technical issues affecting indexability in addition to duplicate content.