Ecommerce SEO: Shared content on product pages
-
Hi Guys,
I am wondering what the best practices are for avoiding duplicate content on product pages that have shared content.
For example, say I have a 3 different product pages for each of the following: Verizon IPhone 5 16GB, AT&T IPhone 5 16GB, AT&T IPhone 5 32GB. Obviously each product is for the most part the same (all are IPhone 5). The only differences lie in the carrier of the phone and the storage capacity.
I want to write product descriptions for each page to target a variety of different keywords, but I don't want to get penalized for duplicate content. Does anybody have any experience in what the SEO best practices are for product pages that have shared content like this?
Thank you!
-
Have a listen to this, it summarizes duplicate content quite nice.
-
Hi,
Thank you for the response! Yes it is a site built using WordPress and WooCommerce. I will be using canonical URLs, but am not sure how to best go about creating product description for different variations of the phones. Here is a perfect example of the situation I am running into.
http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-at-t
http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-32gb-at-t
These two URL are to two separate product pages. The only difference in these two phones is that one is 16gb and the other is 32gb. If you look at the "Key Features" section, you'll notice duplicate content because each phones has pretty much the same features.
Am I better off trying to write difference product descriptions for each variation of phone using different verbiage or stop the crawlers from indexing that section of the page?
-
It would depend on how the site is made. Are you using a CMS like Wordpress or Drupal? What about WooCommerce? Where would you see each phone? For instance, maybe you list popular phones on front page, through search, by category, etc. And then each phone would have its own page? If you have them listed on front page, in search results, by category, etc AND they also have their own page, it is super important to use the rel canonical tag. You want one page to be the official or canon page for each phone.
So if each canonical page should have a unique title and url. Any pages that link that item should link to the canonical page. If you are using CMS, this can be automated (and you definitely want to set up so this gets automated). You just have to be sure the settings are set right.
You also probably want hackable URLs. So for instance you may have phonesite.com/apple/att-iphone-16gb where each Apple phone is phonesite.com/apple and if you go to phonesite.com/apple it shows all the iPhones. Or you could do that by carrier. Probably not both.
Hope this helps!
-
I don't want to get penalized for duplicate content
Best practice would be to write unique content everywhere it is needed.
Or, you could serve the visitor to combine these pages and allow them to directly compare and choose.
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
-
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
Different content on pages with the same URL--except one is at www and the other at www2
Hi! I have two pages with unique content on each. However, they have virtually the same URL--except one is a www and the other is a www2. As far as I know, both pages were meant to gain organic traction. How should this situation be handled for SEO purposes? Thanks for any help! ---Ivey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nichiha0 -
Web accessibility - High Contrast web pages, duplicate content and SEO
Hi all, I'm working with a client who has various URL variations to display their content in High Contrast and Low Contrast. It feels like quite an old way of doing things. The URLs look like this: domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/ - Default URL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=hc - High Contrast page
domain.com/bespoke-curtain-making/?style=lc - Low Contrast page My questions are: Surely this content is duplicate content according to a search engine Should the different versions have a meta noindex directive in the header? Is there a better way of serving these pages? Thanks.0 -
If there any SEO downside in using Google+ brand page for news curation?
We are thinking about using our Google+ brand page to curate relevant news from different sources and organize them in Collections. We are confident that we can generate backlinks, followers, and engagement with this strategy. My fear is to suffer some penalty due to the fact that will not be sharing our own content. We will be redirecting the clicks to the website of the owner of the content; using Start a Fire tracking links (https://startafire.com/). Since I am not aware of any Google+ brand page that executed this curated news strategy with success, I decided to post this question. Our goal is to get high ranks for our Google+ brand page for searches to our brand name and for the name of the Collections. BTW, our curated news posts will be automated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grinseo0 -
How can a website have multiple pages of duplicate content - still rank?
Can you have a website with multiple pages of the exact same copy, (being different locations of a franchise business), and still be able to rank for each individual franchise? Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OhYeahSteve0 -
Product with two common names: A separate page for each name, or both on one page?
This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention. I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc) Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible. Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution? Thanks for your help! Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Product Colours change on ecommerce store... similar descriptions.
Hi, In the case of a RED/GREEN/YELLOW coffeemaker for example, I have say 6 pages that are indexed in google. Now, I can write very unique content for each and that gives me 6 pages in SERPS. Or make it a configurable product? What is best, and how different would the description need to be - my feeling that just changing the word colour in the text would NOT be enough. Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How important is the HTML structure for on-page/on-site SEO?
To be more specific, say a page layout has Header, Body, Left Sidebar, Footer sections. Which layout from the following options is more SEO-friendly? Header > Body > Right Sidebar > Footer Body > Header > Right Sidebar > Footer Does it make a big difference to code HTML so that the the copy of the body appears in front of all other sections when spiders crawl a website? Is it worth taking extra steps to make this happen? I am asking this question because our site has a header navigation with a lot of dropdown menus. So I assume that this is "noise" for spiders as it pushes the main content of the page down. Please bear in mind that the question is more geared towards how search engine see the page rather than how it appears to the end user as layout can be controlled by CSS.This question also assumes that all other on-site SEO best practices are followed for both options.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saugar0