Duplicate content through product variants

[netzkern_AG]

Hi,

Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique.

The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals.

In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants.

As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product.

I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of!

Kind Regards,

Nico

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hehehe yes we do usually!

[netzkern_AG]

Thanks for the hint!

Personally, I am a big fan of schema.org and marking up all the products has been on my further ToDo list.

[netzkern_AG]

Hi Martijn,

Thanks for your reply. I'll have to check with the responsible developer - but I fear that this option is not on the table. Then again, I have been hinted at that a complete redesign might eventually be. As I said below: Nobody who does SEO seems to have been around when the site was created. And we all know what happens in such a case, don't we?

[netzkern_AG]

Hi Matt,

If it were only that easy... I have since learnt that way back when the client had that website developed he specifically asked to NOT have an ecommerce website. (I, nor anybody advising on SEO, was not around back then AFAIK.)

The products are not connected. They are litereally independently created pages with the same template. The URLs are not parameter based but look like

http://www.example.de/category/subcategory1/subcategory2/product_name-further_description_1

http://www.example.de/category/subcategory1/subcategory2/product_name-further_descripittion_2

So, identical apart from the last bit that is NOT a parameter. And the last bit might be "750-kg" or "Alu" or "with-brakes". Thanks for the advice; I agree that it is generally a good starting point but sadly not possible in this case.

[halcyonyarn]

Just implemented something similar to this, and used canonicals. Also, if you're able to add more than just canonicals, possibly worth looking at microdata? We used schema.org isVariantOf for colors and size variants, not sure how much this influences googles understanding / search display, but it's widely recommended and seems unlikely to hurt. Implementing took a little trial and error, this helped as did google's schema testing tool.

[MattAntonino]

What do the duplicate content URLs look like? In a lot of ecommerce systems you end up with parameter-based URLs such as:

http://www.example.com/products/women/dresses/green.htm
http://www.example.com/products/women?category=dresses&color=green

According to Google "When Google detects duplicate content, such as the pages in the example above, a Google algorithm groups the duplicate URLs into one cluster and selects what the algorithm thinks is the best URL to represent the cluster (and) tries to consolidate what we know about the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the one representative URL. However, when Google can't find all the URLs in a cluster or is unable to select the representative URL that you prefer, you can use the URL Parameters tool to give Google information about how to handle URLs containing specific parameters." (see more at Google Support)

If your URLs are parameter based I would suggest looking into handling them at that level in Search Console or (last resort) robots.txt as well. However, I'd start with canonicals and parameters if possible.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Nico,

As you said it's far from prefect but I would indeed go with using a canonical on the pages that have duplicate variants. But if you're doing this already then it might be not that much more effort to also link them back on the back-end of your site so you can do more advanced things.