Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ecommerce Site - Duplicate product descriptions & SKU pages
-
Hi
I have a couple of questions regarding the best way to optimise SKU pages on a large ecommerce site.
At the moment we have 2 landing pages per product - one is the primary landing page with no SKU, the other includes the SKU in the URL so our sales people & customers can find it when using the search facility on the site. The SKU landing page has a canonical pointing to the primary page as they're duplicates.
Is this the best way? Or is it better to have the one page with the SKU in the URL?
Also, we have loads of products with the very similar product descriptions, I am working on trying to include a unique paragraph or few sentences on these to improve the content - how dangerous is the duplicate content within your own site?
I know its best to have totally unique content, but it won't be possible on a site with thousands of products and a small team. At the moment I am trying to prioritise the products to update.
Thank you
-
Hi,
Yes we use the SKU's on the other pages too. Thanks for everyone's feedback
-
Thanks, I'll set up some tests to see if this proves anything either way
Thanks
-
Hmmmm, not sure they will be ranked better, especially if they already have canonical permanent pages.
Why not use the permanent URLs in the emails also. They will look neater too for the end user and SERPS as the
www.yourdomain.com/storage-boxes/niceday-economy-archive-boxes
Looks better than
www.yourdomain.com/storage-boxes/46546545021.php etc You could always try a 301 redirect for the SKU pages so they point to the nice URL pages.
-
Also just to add, with regard to product pages - we link to the SKU page in email marketing & these URL's with the SKU are what users can find when searching in the onsite search facility.
As the urls with the SKU's will get more traffic & active users through other mediums, could this affect how Google rates them?
With regard to internal links we link the the permanent URL and not the SKU URL however
-
These are really the only two I am aware of for actual page content over meta etc. Other Mozzers may have some additional tools they could share... Good luck
-
Great thank you.
Do you know of any good internal duplicate content checkers? I am looking at copyscape or siteliner.
Thanks
-
In that case, if you can I would definitely try and create some unique content for these category pages, I understand it can be difficult when talking about boxes when they all kind of do the same thing. Storage boxes, moving boxes, cardboard boxes, plastic boxes, containers.... what do they all do? they store and hold things right!.
I used to work for a large national office supplies company so know your pain, but a little extra content may help make a difference if you really need a particular category page to rank better against your competitors in what is already a very difficult and competitive area.
-
Great thanks for your input.
With regard to the duplicate content, it's not so much on these pages which are canonicalised, it's more so on ranges of products under separate URLs. e.g. Storage boxes
A lot of the ranges are so similar, that the product description points are the same and I wanted to include some unique text - if it's worth doing
Thanks!
-
By canonicalising the SKU page to your intended landing/product page I think you are doing the best option for your situation, that is providing the URL features the product name etc. You seem to be very clued up and by the sounds of it doing everything right, I would not think that people in general would search for a SKU so having the other page as the dominant authority page is probably best.
However, as an option rather than having two pages surely you could have just one and have the search facility on your site pull back the landing page based in the SKU as a filterable/searchable element.
That way you would not need to have multiple pages and have to create double the unique content as you would only have once page to look after.
As for the similar pages, I agree adding some unique content to help differentiate them would help.
Hope that helps
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
-
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 16, 2016, 12:21 PM | BeckyKey1 -
Contextual FAQ and FAQ Page, is this duplicate content?
Hi Mozzers, On my website, I have a FAQ Page (with the questions-responses of all the themes (prices, products,...)of my website) and I would like to add some thematical faq on the pages of my website. For example : adding the faq about pricing on my pricing page,... Is this duplicate content? Thank you for your help, regards. Jonathan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 7, 2015, 3:02 AM | JonathanLeplang0 -
Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.
I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site. Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point) It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages. love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 20, 2017, 1:50 PM | mark_baird0 -
Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages
Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors. I have two routes I could take: a) Make 50 separate product pages Pros: -Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats. -Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat). Cons: -Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color) b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants Pros: -More elegant and organized -NO duplicate Content Cons: -Losing out on color specific search terms -Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions. Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 4, 2013, 12:48 PM | birchlore0 -
Artist Bios on Multiple Pages: Duplicate Content or not?
I am currently working on an eComm site for a company that sells art prints. On each print's page, there is a bio about the artist followed by a couple of paragraphs about the print. My concern is that some artists have hundreds of prints on this site, and the bio is reprinted on every page,which makes sense from a usability standpoint, but I am concerned that it will trigger a duplicate content penalty from Google. Some people are trying to convince me that Google won't penalize for this content, since the intent is not to game the SERPs. However, I'm not confident that this isn't being penalized already, or that it won't be in the near future. Because it is just a section of text that is duplicated, but the rest of the text on each page is original, I can't use the rel=canonical tag. I've thought about putting each artist bio into a graphic, but that is a huge undertaking, and not the most elegant solution. Could I put the bio on a separate page with only the artist's info and then place that data on each print page using an <iframe>and then put a noindex,nofollow in the robots.txt file?</p> <p>Is there a better solution? Is this effort even necessary?</p> <p>Thoughts?</p></iframe>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 11, 2013, 7:07 PM | sbaylor0 -
How to properly link to products from category pages?
Hi All, We have an e-commerce website and the category pages are built so that there is a product image and below it there is the title. Both the image and the title are in a href (each on its own). I encountered the following unfinished discussion here at MOZ:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 17, 2012, 1:08 AM | BeytzNet
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-optimize-achor-text-links-on-ecommerce-category-page#post-93758 The discussion states that its improper. The question is - if it is wrong then why? (maybe because Google will give its weight to the image anchor instead of the text anchor since it is higher in the page). The other question is how to resolve the matter?
Should I add nofollow to the image href? Thanks0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 6, 2011, 3:18 PM | Peter2640 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 14, 2011, 3:44 AM | EricPacifico0