Almost Duplicate Product names (READ almost!)

[Entrusteddev]

Hi Mozzers,

Here is a dilemma I thought I'd put forward and see how you guys would handle the situations.

I'm working on a comparison website on which many of of the product names are very similar. There are circa 2000 products, of which many have similar names. Here are a few of the product names for example;

• Airsprung Enigma 5ft Mattress

• Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress

• Silentnight Double Nova 6ft Mattress

The Product name has been used in the page title of the product pages as show below;

Compare Prices on the Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress

SEOmoz is highlighting these pages as having Duplicate Page Titles (and meta descriptions as a similar approach has been used).

How would you handle this situation?

Cheers

Aran

[Entrusteddev]

Thanks for your response. You make some interesting points regarding your competitors ranking despite the Dupe content.

Really appreciate your input,

Regards

Aran

[eTundra]

I also work on a large ecommerce site with thousands of very similar products so I feel your pain.

I want to qualify what I'm about to say with a "this is preliminary research and I have no idea if it applies to your niche or if it is indeed true everywhere.... BUT"

My impression is that SEOMoz's Campaigns Tool is somewhat more sensitive to near-duplicate content than Google might be - at least on very long tail keywords like "Airsprung Enigma 5 ft mattress."  I came to this conclusion after seeing my competitor rank for several different types of the same commercial refrigerator and on each of the product pages they only have one or two words that are different in the URL, H1, Page Title, and even the product description paragraph.

The fact that Google still ranks each individual page for a separate keyword tells me they are not thinking this is duplicate or near duplicate content (or perhaps they just realize my competitor is talking about very similar products).

Anyway, I could be wrong in that interpretation, and if I am someone let me know.

More importantly, what to do about very similar products:

I plan on following the strategy discussed in this Q&A post:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-within-website-problem

Summary: place many very similar productson one comprehensive page and then write a bunch of quality, authoritative content for that page.  This gives you (and others) one central place to link to, one place to optimize, and most importantly (at least for my site) a way to reduce the number of very similar products showing up in category pages when browsing.

[SimonCullum]

Sounds like a good plan, automation can certainly save a lot of time, will just need to keep an eye on the titles and descriptions that are generated as that human touch can go a long way.

Tip: make sure that the titles and descriptions tie in closely to the main page content. If they do then you've built a very handy tool there

Regards

Simon

[Entrusteddev]

Hi Simon,

Sound advice, after a few days of head scratching I worked with the developers to create a new routine that generates page titles as products are added to the site. There are way to many products to handle it manually so the programmatic approach is a must.

We have managed to vary the page titles enough with the data we have to generate 'near' unique page titles and meta descriptions.

I just wondered how others may do it.

Cheers for your input Simon.

Regards

Aran

EDIT: correcting my typos

[SimonCullum]

Hi Aran

With Search, 'duplicate' can also mean 'very similair' as well as actually the same, hence why they've been flagged up as duplicate, which I think you already get from your addition of 'Almost'.

What I'd suggest is to make sure that the Page Content is noticeably different on every page. Still relevant to that page's product, just different enough from the other pages so that it's not classed as duplicate.

That way, the overall pages will most likely not be seen as duplicate pages, thus avoiding any duplicate content penalties.

Could also consider making use of the Canonical tag where pages are very similar with no real chance of them being made more unique.

If there is any way to distinguish some of the page titles and descriptions further then go for it, for some of them make use of the 65 to 70 available character space in the title.

Hope that helps.

Regards

Simon