How to provide product information without duplicate content?
-
Hi all,
I have an ecommerce website with approx 400 products, these are quite technical products and i use to have helpful information about the products on the product pages...
My SEO company told me to remove all this, as i had lots of duplicate content issues...
I have since had content writers re-write all product descriptions (about 250 words per product)... and now i am trying to figure out a way of getting the "helpful" information back on but in some kind of dynamic way...
There is basically about 5 or 6 blocks of information, that can be added to each product page, these overlap hundreds of products.
i was thinking of perhaps creating a separate static page for each block of useful information, and putting links on the product pages to this...
however, ideally i would prefer to not keep sending customers to other pages... so wanted to see if others had come across similar issues themselves and how they went about having this "content" available to the user but in such a way it was not duplicate content...
Please note using images would not be any good here, as the content varies in size but most of it is text based...
regards
James
-
Hi James,
That will probably do it. If you want to avoid having to fiddle with the paging code etc check out something like (grabbed the first link I saw) http://www.jquery4u.com/function-demos/ajax/
Loading content with ajax/jquery is pretty straightforward
-
Thanks for all the replies, seems Andy is on the right track... so i had a look around at some scripts that might perform what i need... i came across this: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/ajaxpaginate/index.htm
I could remove the paginations, and change the direct links to images, so in my limited understanding that would leave very little content for google to crawl, and there fore get rid of any duplicate content issues... does this seem correct?
please advise
-
I think Andy’s idea to use java script to pull the information is fairly a good idea but if the major problem is only the duplication of content on the product pages I would suggest you to add UGC areas on the product section and allow people to leave their comments about the product... make the UGC area crawlable to Google... when Google will come to crawl the page they will find different comments on each page which will allow the product page to stay unique as far as the content is concern!
Controlling UGC is the issue as people sometime drop shitty comments so it is better to have a moderation instead of allowing the comments to go live directly.
-
As Andy says you could pull the information into a popup/lightbox/div using javascript and source it all from the same url, so should do the trick.
Just thinking out loud now, but it might be worth testing putting the generic texts back into some of the product pages and seeing what happens. 250 word unique texts for each product might be enough to make the moz crawler (and the search engines) see enough value and difference on each page for it not to be an issue anymore. You could test in a single category for example and cross check against analytics and ranking data to see what happens.
-
As far as I am aware that is not how canonical tags are designed to be used. That use would imply that the category page itself is where the original detail is found and this is not the case for most shopping carts, which are just "lists" of products and are not product details.
This use would just confuse matters further as it is saying "don't rank this product, rank the category page because that's where this info is from" which is not what is needing to be done here.
-
You could probably consider using canonical tags for products of the same category? Get the product pages to point to the main category page. Since if they're part of the same category, the technical information will be mostly overlapping.
This way you can have all your technical information present on your page, but at the same time not be penalised for having duplicated content and making yourself searchable for the different category of products.
Hope this helps!
- Alex
-
best way i've found is to use something like facebox to draw in information from another page using javascript, google just see's it as a link to that page.
you can also do a similar thing without the pop up box, im sure someone here can remember it's name / method.
twiddles thumbs look here they come
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
-
How to deal with 100s of Wordpress media link pages, containing images, but zero content
I have a Wordpress website with well over 1000 posts. I had a SEO audit done and it was highlighted that every post had clickable images. If you click the image a new webpage opens containing nothing but the image. I was told these image pages with zero content are very bad for SEO and that I should get them removed. I have contacted several Wordpress specialists on People Per Hour. I have basically been offered two solutions. 1 - redirect all these image pages to a 404, so they are not found by Google 2 - redirect each image page to the main post page the image is from. What's my best option here? Is there a better option? I don't care if these pages remain, providing they are not crawled by Google and classified as spam etc. All suggestions greatly received!
Web Design | | xpers0 -
Any alternative techniques to display tabbed content without using Javascript / JSON and be SEO Friendly?
John Mueller's input in the EGWMH hangout suggests that Google MAY ignore expandable content served by Javascript. Are there any alternative techniques to display tabbed content without using Javascript / JSON and be SEO Friendly? I do however view these as good for website interactivity and UX - and see many examples of websites performing well and ranking highly whilst using these techniques - are there any Google friendly ways to serve content on a page so that search bots can recognise and choose to crawl / consume the content as legitimate fodder?
Web Design | | Fergclaw0 -
The impact of using directories without target keyword on our Rankings
Hello all, I have a question regarding a website I am working on. I’ve read a lot of Q en A’s but couldn’t really find the best answer. For one of our new websites we are thinking about the structure of this website and the corresponding URL-structure. Basically we have a main product (and a few main keywords) which should drive the most traffic to our website, and for which we want to optimize our homepage. Besides those main keywords, we have an enormous base of long-tail keywords from which we would like to generate traffic. This means we want to create a lot of specific pages which are optimized. My main question is the following: We are thinking of two options: Option 1: www.example.com/example-keyword-one Option 2: www.example.com/directory/example-keyword-one With option 1 we will link directly from our homepage to the most important pages (which represent our most important keywords). All the pages with the long tail content will be linked from another section on our website, which is one click away from our homepage (specifically a /solutions page which is linked from the footer). All the pages with long-tail content will have this structure www.example.com/example-keyword-one so the URLs will not contain the directory /solutions With option 2 we will use more subdirectories in our URLs. Specifically, for all the long tail content we would use URLs like this: www.example.com/solutions/example-keyword-one
Web Design | | NielsB
The directories we want to use wouldn't really have added value in terms of SEO, since they don’t represent important keywords. So what is the best way to go? Option 1, straightforward, short URL’s which don’t really represent the linking structure of our website, but only contain important keywords. Or option 2, choose for more directories in our URLs which represent the linking structure of our website, but contain directories which don’t represent important keywords. Would the keyword ‘solutions’ in the directory (which doesn’t really relate to the content on the page) have a negative impact on our rankings for that URL?0 -
Wordpress Blog Providing SEO to Main Site
Hi, I recently started a very much "learn on the job" SEO position, transitioning from a copywriting background. We currently have a wordpress blog up and running (and producing some decent quality content too I hope!) at example.com/blog/ and a sign up page located at example.com (sorry, can't put the address right now) for a site that is being custom built as it's got some nifty software linking to back end systems. My question is whether the content on the blog will bring SEO benefits to the main domain or whether it'll just be for the blog itself? If the latter, should we navigate the blog onto the a separate page of the main site? Thanks so much! I'm learning as much as I can as quickly as I can, but somethings still get me in a little bit of a tizzy.
Web Design | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Using content from other sites without duplicate content penalties?
Hi there, I am setting up a website, where i believe it would substantially benefit users experience if i setup a database of information on artists. I am torn because to feasibly do this correctly, i would have content that is built from multiple sources, but has no real unique content. It would have parts from Wikipedia, parts from other websites etc. All would be sourced of-course. My concern is that if i do this, am i risking in devaluing my website because of this. Is there a way i can handle this without taking a hit?
Web Design | | BorisD0 -
Is it common to have some of error/warning(currency duplicate,redirect, etc...) in most website that rank well?
Hi could any body could give me some idea on 'on page optimisation' Currently in my campaign I have around 3000+ errors, 14,000+ warning, 7000+ notices for the following reasons: Overly-Dynamic URL
Web Design | | LauraHT
Temporary Redirect
Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters)
Duplicate Page Title
etc... First of all I know these have negative effect on SEO. Now to fix towards those issues it involve lots of works and times. At the same time most of our important keywords/url rank position have not changed over the last 12 months. Does that mean the above has only limited negative effect? I just want to know is it worthy to invest the man/hour/money to clean those issues. As it involves decent development time. Is it common to have some of error/warning in most website that rank well? (e.g. I 've seem may big website have duplicate title/meta-desc on their currency variant page)0 -
Suggestions for content slider/image slider copy/paste application.
Hey Moz Community, I am looking for a content slider that can be easily changed by non-technicals for posting different styles of content/calls to action and this seems to be best: http://www.slidedeck.com/ I have installed a nivo slider on a Seattle Painting site, and flash slider on a commercial painting site. But I want my blog clients to be able to format..then copy/paste code..linke embedding a video. opinions? Thanks John
Web Design | | johnshearer0 -
Products page design | e-commerce
Hi All, We are redesiging our ecommerce site and product page is bothering us. We want to tidy up. We want to hide some of the description with jquery script. Visitor will be able to view first 30 words and there will be a "read more" text link just after that content. If they want to read more (which we think most will do) they will have to click the text link and rest of the content will slide open in the same page. The whole content is visible from source code. Would this be ok as far as Google and SEO concerned? I hope I explained it well 🙂
Web Design | | Jvalops0