How can you avoid duplicate content within your own e-commerce website

[DTOSI]

One of the e-commerce websites I am working on is giving me a lot of duplicate content errors because all of the products are the same, just different sizes.

Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem or should i just ignore it?

Someone in the office brought up the idea to just use an i frame for all product descriptions.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

[Saijo.George]

Short and sweet answer

• rel canonical the pages where you sort by ( siz, price , etc ) even for product you classify by color .( more reading )
• If the pages are split up in to separate pages add rel=prev and rel=next to them ( more reading )

[irvingw]

We are talking five pages - this isn't going to get you penalized. Please consider my suggestion above. You must know why someone would buy the small versus large size and you can write we recommend this size for people looking for best value and who have this type of requirement etc...

[JustinTaylor88]

In that case i would rel=canonical to one version of the product, preferably the most popular size.

I'm not sure about the system you have used to create the site, but you could potentially have single page with a drop down allow users to select the sizes/flavours etc which updates the price on the fly.

[DTOSI]

There is no way I can create 1 page for all of the products. They already have different flavors and all the prices are different. I can definitely stress the sizes for title and meta tags, but unfortunately all of the directions are the same, descriptions for product flavors the same, and customer benefits are the same. If you guys want take a look at the website it is www.petsspark.com. And here is the link to the products http://www.petsspark.com/Tear-Stain-Eliminators-s/1822.htm

[DTOSI]

There is no way I can create 1 page for all of the products. They already have different flavors and all the prices are different. I can definitely stress the sizes for title and meta tags, but unfortunately all of the directions are the same, descriptions for product flavors the same, and customer benefits are the same. If you guys want take a look at the website it is www.petsspark.com. And here is the link to the products http://www.petsspark.com/Tear-Stain-Eliminators-s/1822.htm

[JustinTaylor88]

The easiest solution when the products are the same but different sizes is to rel=canonical to one of the sizes from the duplicate pages of differing size options.

The best solution however is to create one page with all sizes on the page, this is a bit more difficult to do as requires some programming, design etc. but it is worth the effort from both an SEO and UX perspective

check out the folloowing article for info on rel=canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

Hope that helps

[irvingw]

You need to stress the different sizes in the Title, Meta, H1, Product Description and H1 tag. Also, if possible I would spend the time to write about the use cases for each individual size.  The iframe is a bad idea and would not help at all.