Ecommerce SEO: Shared content on product pages

[Cody_West]

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!

[ThomasHarvey]

Have a listen to this, it summarizes duplicate content quite nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxWo4ttPgAc

[Cody_West]

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?

[TapGoods]

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!

[EGOL]

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.