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
-
SEM Rush & Duplicate content
Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate H1 on single page for mobile and desktop
I have a responsive site and whilst this works and is liked by google from a user perspective the pages could look better on mobile. I have a wordpress site and use the Divi Builder with elegant themes and have developed a separate page header for mobile that uses a manipulated background image and smaller H1 font size. When crawling the site two H1s can be detected on the same page - they are exactly the same words and only one will show according to device. However, I need to know if this will cause me a problem with google and SEO. As the mobile changes are not just font size but also adaptations to some visual elements it is not something I can simply alter in the CSS. Would appreciate some input as to whether this is a problem or not
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cells4Life0 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Problems with ecommerce filters causing duplicate content.
We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site. We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this? We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue; adding "no index" to all filtered pages making the filters uncrawble using javascript Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream0 -
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 | | mark_baird0 -
How To Best Close An eCommerce Site?
We're closing down one of our eCommerce sites. What is the best approach to do this? The site has a modest link profile (a young site). It does have a run of site link to the parent site. It also has a couple hundred email subscribers and established accounts. Is there a gradual way to do this? How do I treat the subscribers and account holders? The impact won't be great, but I want to minimize collateral damage as much as possible. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Best way to merge 2 ecommerce sites
Our Client owns two ecommerce websites. Website A sells 20 related brands. Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google. Website B was purchased from a competitor. It has 1 brand (also sold on site A). Search results are normally high on the first page of google. Client wants to consider merging the two sites. We are looking at options. Option 1: Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A. Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A Option 4: ??? Any thoughts on this would be great. We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EugeneF0
