Almost Duplicate Product names (READ almost!)
-
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
-
-
Thanks for your response. You make some interesting points regarding your competitors ranking despite the Dupe content.
Really appreciate your input,
Regards
Aran
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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
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
-
Recurring events and duplicate content
Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | | megan.helmer0 -
Internal duplicated content on articles, when is too much?
I have an automotive rental blog with articles that explain the pros of renting a specific model. So in this articles the advantages of rental versus the buying of a new model. This advantages are a list with bullets like this:
Technical SEO | | markovald
Rental | Buy new car
Rental:
Free car insurance
Free assistance
etc.
Buy new car
You have to pay insurance
You have to pay assistance
etc. etc. I want to do this because i want to make all articles like landing pages...
This "advantages box" have 100 characters. The general length of articles on my blog is 500/600 characters. So i have an average of 15/20% internal duplicated content on all my articles. Is this bad for seo? Any alternatives?0 -
Duplicate content and canonicalization confusion
Hello, http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR pages have same content and their canonical refers to the page itself. Yet, they rank in search engines. Is it because they have been targeted to different geographical locations? If so, still the content is same. Please help me clear this confusion. Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Product Schema implementation
Hi Once you have added structured data to a web page, say adding 'product schema' to a product page how long can you reasonably expect before it take effects, ie. displays rich snippets ? Also in the case of product schema what triggers the display of the rich snippet ? is it a branded keyword and product title search or just a product title search or can it result from a generic keyword search too ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate content problem?
Hello! I am not sure if this is a problem or if I am just making something too complicated. Here's the deal. I took on a client who has an existing site in something called homestead. Files cannot be downloaded, making it tricky to get out of homestead. The way it is set up is new sites are developed on subdomains of homestead.com, and then your chosen domain points to this subdomain. The designer who built it has kindly given me access to her account so that I can edit the site, but this is awkward. I want to move the site to its own account. However, to do so Homestead requires that I create a new subdomain and copy the files from one to the other. They don't have any way to redirect the prior subdomain to the new one. They recommend I do something in the html, since that is all I can access. Am I unnecessarily worried about the duplicate content consequences? My understanding is that now I will have two subdomains with the same exact content. True, over time I will be editing the new one. But you get what I'm sayin'. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | devbook90 -
Duplicate content + wordpress tags
According to SEOMoz platform, one of my wordpress websites deals with duplicate content because of the tags I use. How should I fix it? Is it loyal to remove tag links from the post pages?
Technical SEO | | giankar0 -
Are all duplicate pages bad?
I just got my first Crawl Report for my forum and it said I have almost 9,000 duplicate pages. When I looked at a sample of them though I saw that many of them were "reply" links. By this I mean the "reply" button was clicked for a topic yet since the crawler was not a member, it just brought them to the login/register screen. Since all the topics would bring you to the same login page I'm assuming it counted all these "reply" links as duplicates. Should I just ignore these or is there some way to fix it? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Xee0 -
Canonical Link for Duplicate Content
A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example: Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Technical SEO | | kchandler
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs: But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther? Thanks - Kyle Chandler0