A lot of product pages with very similar content
-
I'm working with someone who's setting up an online jewelry store. The jewelry is available in many metal types, so we're creating filters to provide a good user experience in trying to narrow down their choice.
Let's take an example of a wedding ring that's available these options:
10kt yellow gold
10kt white gold
18kt yellow gold
18kt white gold
Palladium
PlatinumThese are all entered as separate products, so that they can be used in the filtering system. However, apart from some minor changes to the title and description most of the content will be identical, across these 6 product pages.
Also, many wedding ring styles are going to be very similar, so we're going to have very similar descriptions for a lot of the rings.
We're concerned about problems this might cause with the search engines in terms of duplicate content. There's 2 issues that I an see (there may be more!):
- They will not index many of the pages and we'll leak link juice to those pages that will never get indexed
- They do index all the variations, but the content is so similar, that we have different pages competing for essentially the same keywords
Also, these products are likely to come and go, so investing heavily on creating really unique content for them isn't really sustainable, affordable.
Any advise?
Thanks,
-
Thanks Ricko. That's is what we're thinking. Put it up and see what happens before blocking pages or anything like that.
There is an existing site there already. We're doing a redesign, using a new eCommerce platform. The site currently has a domain authority of 27, and all the category pages urls we'll be able to maintain, and they have page authority, which is good. So, it shouldn't take long for us to see what will happen with the new pages.
Thanks.
-
Ahh, I better understand your initial comment. Your concern makes complete sense.
I'd still go with the form technique and apply it to title tags as well (see EGOL's comment). It will help you better target longer tail which may be your best bet anyway (unless you're already a link powerhouse and can compete for the more general search phrases).
I wouldn't go an hide/canonical/disallow anything until i knew G was having a problem with it. But that's just me.
Is this site replacing an old one? What's that structure like and is anything working there?
-
Thanks for comprehensive reply, Ricko.
First, just to address what you mentioned about getting 2 listings: my concern was more about 2 of my pages competing for keywords, when actually 1 page with more page rank (rather than page rank being split over 2) would have a better chance of ranking. Do you know what I mean?
The form optimization solution sounds interesting, and this is stuff that we're planing to do, but manually. My concern is though: will this make the pages unique enough? It seems from what you said that it might just be?
On the last thing you mentioned about customer reviews: this is something that I've considered. The problem is the high number of products, and the relatively low level of sales volume (initially at least) making this a more long term solution.
Thanks,
Leigh
-
Nice reply... thumbsup!
-
Hey Leigh,
First off, I'd say that your #2 concern would be a great problem to have! I'd rather own 2 of the top listings than just 1!
In scenarios where product-level optimization is not feasible/efficient/etc, I'd try to get as many data points on each product as possible and do 'form optimization'. I see that your initial descriptions are going to be similar. You should enhance them a bit using product attribute info. It takes a bit of programming but worth it in the long run!
Do you have other product attributes which can be worked into each product page template?
Maybe stuff like:
- Size availability (2,3,4,etc.)
- Color/style options (white, gold, pink, etc.)
- Seasonal availability (winter, spring, year-round, etc.)
- Parent category names (wedding ring, anniversary necklace, etc.)
- Material (gold, sterling, etc)
- Fulfillment time [1 week, immediately, etc.)
- Weight
In this case, you can enhance your descriptions with that data. For example, your product page template would look like:
The [Insert Ring Name] is a [Insert material] [Insert parent category name] available in a variety of sizes including [insert size options, comma separated]. The [insert product name] is available [insert availability attribute] and usually ships [insert fulfillment time].
Would yield something like this on a specific product page:
The 14k yellow gold ring is a yellow gold wedding ring available in a variety of sizes including 1,2.3 and 4. The 14k yellow gold is available year round and usually ships in 1-week.
We're still seeing form optimization work pretty well as long as:
- The content is pretty useful and not just a bunch of keywords and attributes stuffed onto each page (aka, provide value, especially to the customer!)
- You have at least a few different data points for each product which can be utilized to hide the appearance of 'form optimization'
O yeah, not sure of your sales volume but push the h*ll out of getting customers to write reviews and make sure the reviews appear in a SE friendly way on the product pages themselves for added uniqueness.
See where I'm going with this? Hope this helps and good luck!
-
Thanks EGOL.
I agree. The problem is that each metal type needs to be a separate product in order for the filter system to work correctly. And the filtering is very important so that we can provide the best user experience possible.
-
When we have a group of products that have very similar descriptions we display all of them on one page. This allows easy customer comparisons and gives you a page with very substantive content. Also, sometimes google will say in the SERPs... "6+ items".
I believe that reducing the number of pages from six to one helps you run a more compact site that will compete better in the SERPs.
As for your title tag... you might be able to be creative and communicate that you have a nice selection of rings...
Milgrain Wedding Band: White/Yellow Gold, Palladium, Platinum
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
-
Home page duplicate content...
Hello all! I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end: http://www.example.com
Technical SEO | | LiamMcArthur
http://www.example.com/ For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page? rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />0 -
Is putting a manufacturer's product manual on my site in PDF duplicate content
I add the product manuals to our product pages to provide additional product information to our customers. Is this considered duplicate content? Is there a best way to do this so that I can offer the information to my customers without getting penalized for it? Should they be indexable? If not how do I control?
Technical SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on product pages?
Hi, I'm creating a bunch of product pages for courses for a university and I'm concerned about duplicate content penalties. While the page names are different and some of the test is different, much of the text is the same between pairs of pages. I.e. a BA and an MA in a particular subject (say 'hairdressing' will have the same subject descriptions, school introduction paragraph, industry overview paragraph etc. 1. Is this a problem? In a site with 100 pages, if sets of 2 pages have about 50% identical content... 2. If it is a problem, is there anything I can do, other than rewrite the text? 3. From a search perspective, would both pages show up in search results in searches related to 'hairdressing courses' 'study hairdressing' etc? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Hotel affiliate website - noindex pages with little unique content?
We are well into development of a hotel affiliate website (using Expedia Affiliate Network), and I know there are many challenges to SEO when using an affiliate system - one of the biggest being how to handle duplicate content. Outside of blog posts and static marketing pages, the majority of the textual content is contained in hotel descriptions. We will be creating unique descriptions over time, but we are a small team and this will be a lengthy process. My question for you mozzers, is whether or not it's advisable for ranking purposes to noindex any page with mostly 'stock' content, and only allow Google to index hotel pages with unique descriptions? Thanks for any input!
Technical SEO | | CassisGroup0 -
We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like: http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not. Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem: RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L] Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Question about content on ecommerce pages.
Long time ago we hired a seo company to do seo in our website and one of the things they did is that they wrote long text on the category pages of our products. Example here: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/refurbished-printers/wide-format-laser-refurbished-printers Now my marketing person is saying that if its possible to put the text below the items, technically I will find out how to do it, but from your seo experience, is it good or bad? What about if we short those texts to one paragraph only? Thanks
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Google counting numbers of products on category pages - what about pagination ?
Hi there, Whilst checking out the SERPS, as you do, I noticed that where our category page appears, google now seems to be counting the number of products (what it calls items) on the product page and displaying this in the 1st part of the description (see image attached). My problem is we employ pagination, so that our category page will have 15 items on it, then there are paginated results for the rest, with either ?page=2 or page-2/ etc. appended to the URL. Although this is only a minor issue, I was just wondering if there was a way to change the number of products displayed on that page to be the entire number of products in that category, is there a microformat markup or something that can over-ride what google has detected ? Furthermore is this system of pagination effective ? I have considered using javascript pagination, such that all products would be loaded on to the one page but hidden until 'paginated', but I was worried about having hidden elements on the page, and also the impact of load times. Although I think this may solve the problem and display the true number of products in a section! Any help much appreciated, Stuart b4urme.jpg
Technical SEO | | stukerr0 -
Duplicate Content Home Page
Hello, I am getting Duplicate Content warning from SEOMoz for my home page: http://www.teacherprose.com http://www.teacherprose.com/index html I tried code below in .htaccess: redirect 301 /index.html http://www.teacherprose.com This caused error "too many re-directs" in browser Any thoughts? Thank You, Eric
Technical SEO | | monthelie10