Eshop - Prevent Duplicate Product Titles... A Strategy
-
Hi Mozzers !
I'm running a small online vintage bag and jewellery store (www.vintageheirloom.com). Items are unique and need to be written up individually. Whilst the details condition, age etc are unique many of the items name's aren't.
For instance, we have over a year had several bags that we've named: Vintage Celine classic box bag
Naturally Moz has pulled up these as duplicates, same product title.
I could append a unique database id number at the end of each title but it looks strange for the customer.
I could add a few details like condition, age & price e.g. Vintage Celine classic box bag - B+ 80s 90s £425 but I don't think this would be entirely unique either.
Has anyone a good strategy for creating unique product titles that looks ok and informative to the customer?
Thanks for looking.
Kevin
abut some items do have the same Does anyone have a strat
-
Sounds good! Thanks!
-
Hi CleverPHD,
Many thanks for your considered response. I'll definitely add the unique product id at the end, it'll prevent dups as you say. Also I agree a bit more detail in the product title will help with long tail searches.
I'm working on a new site (Wordpress), and will also consider more product categories so again thanks for reminding me :-).
Hope your business is going well.
Thanks
Kevin -
I think you are on the right track. You just need to be more descriptive in your Title tags (and meta descriptions). If the page ranks, then a better description in the Title will help the user know what to click on and potentially can increase your CTR. I went to your website and on the Celine Bags page http://www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-celine/bags you do list things on a bag like the pattern or year or color, etc. Those are things that can help make the title tags unique, just keep on expanding on those ideas.
You may want to consider this. As Google only shows 70 characters, setup your title tag so that it is descriptive but then just to make sure that the title is unique add something like Item #74747 at the very end and use the item id from your system. This can also help the user if they are emailing or calling you to have the item number and eliminate any confusion about what product they are asking about, plus it will always make the title tag unique. Also, if it is after 70 characters, then it will (generally) not show in the SERPs. We have used this in the same way in the meta descriptions to make them unique as well. I help run a site with over 5,000 items that we have used this approach with much success in keeping our titles and descriptions helpful and unique! It looks like you are doing this with the URL already so would not be a big step to put into the other slots.
Just to be clear, I would make the title tag more descriptive to help make it more unique, but then just as a fail safe add the ID number on at the end. It seems that you do not have a huge inventory of these bags and so expanded details on the product in the title tags may be enough - you will have to experiment.
Something else to consider, but it looks like you do not have enough inventory to justify it, if you had a ton of "box bags" I would potentially set that up as a cat or subcat. This way you have a page that will be dedicated to that KW to help with ranking. The transitory nature of your products will make it hard to have a product page that will rank as it seems they are changing. Just something else to consider.
Cheers!
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
-
Canonicalising a product with multiple variants
I am working with an ecommerce site and have encountered an issue I haven't come across before and would appreciate some advice on how to proceed. There are multiple variation products with one master product and then up to 20 or 30 variant products, the variation could be colour, size or both. The site has been set up to canonicalise all the variations to the master variant product, which I understand to be best practice. But, this is where the issue occurs, the master variant product URL 302 redirects to one of the variant product URLs. Example below. My question is, is this harmful to our SEO efforts? Would be be best to canonicalise to a preferred colour or size variation? EXAMPLE: Master variant product: www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123 Seeing this product on the page and clicking will 302 redirect to www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456 On page www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456 the canonical tag is www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123 Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | SimonKenworthy0 -
Commas in title tags
Hello Guys, Thanks in advance for all who can help me with this I am helping a dinnerware company with their SEO. I told them to change their ambiguous title tags for more specific ones. However, they opted to create some title tags with 2 or three keywords separated by commas. I have attached an excel image illustrating their new title tags.. My question is, will this format be a problem with Google--penalties? The questionable title tags are highlighted in light orange. Thanks! lHH92
On-Page Optimization | | HectorCortes0 -
Best Title Im working on
Im working on the best title Design based for the products, Pls suggest This is my title for product page I suggested ACDelco 40-count Super Alkaline AA Batteries: Buy ACDelco 40-count Super Alkaline AA Batteries online at Best Prices: Domain.com and in the page im using ACDelco 40-count Super Alkaline AA Batteries Definitely title crossing more than 60 characters, I have seen many ecommerce site, they never bothered about title character lenght.. Im confused!!! and Is there any best way of title design to include Buy, Online, best price are the frequent keywords with product name. Pls suggest
On-Page Optimization | | Rahim1190 -
How many product subcategories are ok?
Let's say I have a sea glass ankle bracelet. On my site, my main keyword is "Sea Glass Jewelry" and have ranked relatively well for this, but this main page has over 200 products in it. I thought that if the URL has the keywords in it, it would be beneficial. I also have a section for all my bracelets, so it would be there and then, a more specific ankle bracelets category. So, technically, an ankle bracelet will show up 3x. Sea Glass Jewelry (all products go here) Bracelets (all bracelets go here) Ankle Bracelets (only ankle bracelets) The URL is only attached to the main category so to speak. If you click the ankle bracelets category, the url will still revert back to the original main category: seaglassjewelry/sterlinganklebracelet so I don't believe there is duplicate content. I have had my domain for years and it has ranked well until someone hacked into my site 2 years back. I have never been able to recover from this loss. Since then, I have tried to optimize my site, but nothing seems to be working and I just want to make sure that I am not hurting my ranking by doing this. Can someone confirm this is the best way to do it or make a suggestion? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Forum
Hi Everyone, I just signed up last night and received the crawl stats for my site (ShapeFit.com). Since April of 2011, my site has been severely impacted by Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates and we have lost about 80% of our traffic during that time. I have been trying to follow the guidelines provided by Google to fix the issues and help recover but nothing seems to be working. The majority of my time has been invested in trying to add content to "thin" pages on the site and filing DMCA notices for copyright infringement issues. Since this work has not produced any noticeable recovery, I decided to focus my attention on removing bad backlinks and this is how I found SEOmoz. My question is about duplicate content. The crawl diagnostics showed 6,000 errors for duplicate page content and the same for duplicate page title. After reviewing the details, it looks like almost every page is from the forum (shapefit.com/forum). What's the best way to resolve these issues? Should I completely block the "forum" folder from being indexed by Google or is there something I can do within the forum software to fix this (I use phpBB)? I really appreciate any feedback that would help fix these issues so the site can hopefully start recovering from Panda/Penguin. Thank you, Kris
On-Page Optimization | | shapefit0 -
How to avoid duplicate page content
I have over 5.000 duplicate page content because my urls contains ?district=1&sort=&how=ASC¤cy=EUR. How can I fix this?
On-Page Optimization | | bruki0 -
How do I get rid of duplicate page titles when using a php site?
Hi. I have an e-commerce site that sells a list of products. The list is divided into categories and then those categories for the various pages on the site. An example of a page title. would be given root/products.php?c=40 another page would be given root/products.php?c=41 Is there a way to structure the site with SEO in mind?
On-Page Optimization | | curtisgibbsiii0 -
Do videos count as duplicate content?
If we allow users to embed our videos on their site, would that count as duplicate content? I imagine note, given that Google can't usually 'see' the content of videos, but just want to double check.
On-Page Optimization | | nicole.healthline0