Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
-
Hi guys
Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now.
I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products.
A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase).
Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc.
Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content.
Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue.
If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
-
The canonical should pass link equity similar to a 301 redirect.
-
Thanks Mike. It certainly sounds like moving all SKUs onto 1 page is preferable. I suspect that I may need to spend a bit of dosh getting the website's on-page structure amended if going down this approach.
With regards to point 1, I assume the pages will still be crawled but any link equity would be passed to the canonicalised version of the page?
-
I agree with Everett from a standpoint of User Experience. It could potentially be better for users if they appeared on a product page where they could then choose color, size, etc. variables for their product instead of having to click through multiple pages to find the right one or scroll through a huge list of variations.
The reduction in pages should also help consolidate link equity and keep pages from cannibalizing each other in the SERPs.
As for Takeshi's suggestion on Canonicals, I'm a fan of the rel=canonical tag but the potential problem with using them in this instance is twofold. 1) As Takeshi mentioned: "as far as Google is concerned you only have 1 page with the content on it" and 2) Canonicals are suggestions not directives so the search engines may choose not to recognize it if not used properly.
-
As I said, that would be a good second choice, but I'd go with the first option (putting all product variants like size/color on the same page and allowing the user to select which one/s they want to purchase) because the other options still leave a potentially huge amount of product URLs out there for Google to crawl.
Google has to crawl them to see the rel canonical tag. You may only have a certain amount of crawl budget. If you can cut down the amount of URLs on your site that Google has to crawl by as much as half simply by allowing users to select a variant color or size on a product page I think that is best for SEO, as well as for user experience.
-
Thanks for the advice guys.
What do you think of Takeshi's advice below regarding adding canonical link to product page that points to a product category page
I.e. we have 20 of the same jumpers of different sizes, colours. A canonical tag is added to the product page that points to a parent page for the jumper, rather than the specific product page.
-
Thanks Takeshi - this approach sounds like something I can implement sooner rather than later.
Have you had success using it?
-
Thanks Mike - this certainly makes sense.
My product pages do not currently change the URL parameters depending ont he product sku the visitor changes , but the approach you've taken sounds perfect for your setup
-
Similar to what BJS1976 and Takeshi stated, the way we handled the bulk of duplicate content issues from a similar circumstance for our ecommerce site was handling the different varieties of the same product through parameters and then canonicalizing the parameters to the version of the URL sans parameter.
For example, due to database reasons /product1.php?color=42 and /product1.php?color=30 are the same product but one is red and one is blue, the pages are exactly the same & have radials/buttons/dropdowns to choose any available color, /product1.php would default to one specific variation we chose (usually the best selling color) and then /product1.php?color=42 and /product1.php?color=30 had a rel=canonical tag added pointing at /product1.php
For any remaining products flagged as duplicates that couldn't be fixed that way, we set those aside to have myself and another copywriter work on creating further content that would set them apart enough as to not be duplicates.
-
BJS1976 makes some good suggestions.
Another option is to create a category type page that lists all the product variations on it, then canonical each of the individual products to the category page. That way, you still have multiple product pages, but as far as Google is concerned you only have 1 page with the content on it.
-
Hi there,
I'm also working on an ecom site using Magento - in short, there are a couple of ways that come to mind in how to deal with this:
-
Create grouped or configurable products that bring these simple products into 1 single product - customer then chooses size and colour for example.
-
Rewrite a lot of unique content in the product descriptions for each variation.
In my experience, sales convert better on option 1, plus my gut tells me they are favoured by Google.
Good luck!
-
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
-
Why are some pages now duplicate content?
It is probably a silly question, but all of a sudden, the following pages of one of my clients are reported as Duplicate content. I cannot understand why. They weren't before... http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal
Technical SEO | | MarketingEnergy
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma Thanks for any help in the right direction 🙂 | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| | <colgroup><col style="mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 17225; width: 353pt;" width="471"></colgroup>
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma |0 -
Duplicate Content Errror
I am getting a duplicate content error for urls for the "tags" or categories pages for my blog. These are some the URLs that SEOmoz is saying are errors, or duplicate pages. http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=Facebook http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=content+marketing http://sacmarketingagency.com/blog/?Tag=inbound+marketing As you can see, they are just the pages that are aggregating certain blog post based on how we tagged them with the appropriate category. Is this really a problem for our SEO, if so any suggestions on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | TalkingSheep0 -
Is Noindex Enough To Solve My Duplicate Content Issue?
Hello SEO Gurus! I have a client who runs 7 web properties. 6 of them are satellite websites, and 7th is his company's main website. For a long while, my company has, among other things, blogged on a hosted blog at www.hismainwebsite.com/blog, and when we were optimizing for one of the other satellite websites, we would simply link to it in the article. Now, however, the client has gone ahead and set up separate blogs on every one of the satellite websites as well, and he has a nifty plug-in set up on the main website's blog that pipes in articles that we write to their corresponding satellite blog as well. My concern is duplicate content. In a sense, this is like autoblogging -- the only thing that doesn't make it heinous is that the client is autoblogging himself. He thinks that it will be a great feature for giving users to his satellite websites some great fresh content to read -- which I agree, as I think the combination of publishing and e-commerce is a thing of the future -- but I really want to avoid the duplicate content issue and a possible SEO/SERP hit. I am thinking that a noindexing of each of the satellite websites' blog pages might suffice. But I'd like to hear from all of you if you think that even this may not be a foolproof solution. Thanks in advance! Kind Regards, Mike
Technical SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Duplicate Homepage issue
SEOMOZ says my site has two homepages: www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/ When you go to "www.mysite.com/" the URL changes to "www.mysite.com" Why is this happening and what can I do about it?
Technical SEO | | LucasF0 -
Tags and Duplicate Content
Just wondering - for a lot of our sites we use tags as a way of re-grouping articles / news / blogs so all of the info on say 'government grants' can be found on one page. These /tag pages often come up with duplicate content errors, is it a big issue, how can we minimnise that?
Technical SEO | | salemtas0 -
Is using a customer quote on multiple pages duplicate content?
Is there any risk with placing the same customer quote (3-4 sentences) on multiple pages on your site?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
Strange duplicate content issue
Hi there, SEOmoz crawler has identified a set of duplicate content that we are struggling to resolve. For example, the crawler picked up that this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/industry-insight/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career is a duplicate of this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career. The latter page's content is the original and can be found in the CMS admin area whilst the former page is the duplicate and has no entry in the CMS. So we don't know where to begin if the "duplicate" page doesn't exist in the CMS. The crawler states that this page www. creative-choices.co.uk/industry-insight/inside/creative-writing is the referrer page. Looking at it, only the original page's link is showing on the referrer page, so how did the crawler get to the duplicate page?
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0 -
About duplicate content
Hi i'm a new guy around here, but i'm having this problem in my website. Using de Seomoz tools i ran a camping to my website, in results i get to many errors for duplicate conten, for example, http://www.mysite/blue/ http://www.mysite/blue/index.html, so my question is, what is the best way to resolve this problem, use a 301 or use the rel canonical tag? Wich url will be consider for main url, Thanks for yor help.
Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM0