Duplicate Product Descriptions
-
Hi All,
After a bit of advice please, we will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product. Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique.
The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc.
I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO.
My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content? If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed.
Many thanks in advance for any advice.
-
What could you do if the Duplicate description was the actual wording " Product Description " ? Using BigCommerce they have it set up this way and It's rather baffling it is so.
-
Hey,
I was thinking the exact same thing! possible I could divide the fabrics up into types to break it down a little more.
Thanks again.
-
Thanks Tim,
I have been looking at ways to do something similar and our developer guys is login to take a look at whats involved. For now it looks like I'm going to have to make the text as unique as possible.
Thanks again.
-
I agree with Tim, the option selecting would make the most sense, but I can understand how 300 choices would be rather overwhelming in a drop down. Is there a way you can sub-divide the color options down?
-
Ah so each chair can have up to 300+ fabrics available to it. That is a very customisable chair. I was expecting you to say a few colour options, a few leg options and few fabric options etc, not into the hundreds. You could make the UX/UI relatively easy to understand if presented in a nice step by step guide once a user has landed on the chairs page. e.g. Step 1: Choose your legs, Step 2: Choose your fabric , Step 3: Choose a colour.
If this is a definate no go In that case I would imagine that you would need to try and do a little more on the unique content front for each item. I know that will be a pain, but getting your H1, title and first paragraphs, product alt tags, product schema to include the product name will be imperative. If the rest of the product is similar it will be very hard to make each totally unique.
This is a great example I just found - http://www.sofasbysaxon.com/the-range/customiser/sofas/typist-chair. Even though it could do with a little refinement
-
Thanks both for the quick reply!
I have considered creating just one product with multiple variations but to have 300+ fabric variations, 4 leg style variations, 6 leg colour variations and 2 facing variations would make the UI ugly and almost impossible to use.
If I were to change the long description to also include the fabric colour would that make it unique enough? i.e 3 out of c.300 words would be different.
Thanks
-
Hmmmmm 300+ pages all with very similar content. This would make it difficult to canonicalise to just one product of each type.
Rather than having lots of different pages with just blue chair, green chair, red chair. Could you simply not just have chair and then as an option the colour within the page.
So
Leather High Back Chair.
Price - $£200
Options - red, cream, black , tan [make a selection box/check box to choose] This way you have just one item that can be optimised be the main item.Hope that helps.
-
I would suggest that either you make the fabric and finishes part of the long description (making each one unique) or approach this as one product (and therefore one page) with different fabric and finish options.
If you do end up going with the similar description, could you make a main page for the product with sub-pages for the various different page for the fabrics and finishes and use the canonical tag to point at the main page.
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
-
Global Product Tabs and SEO
I am looking at a site that has global or duplicated content in 4 tabs for things like shipping, quality etc on tabs on each product page. The content is very good for UX and helps conversions but poor for SEO. Each product page has unique and tagged photos, unique title and a unique description. Is there away to specifically tell search engines that individual parts of a page are duplicated for good reason? Linking to the content to a single page decreases conversion dramatically but having it on tabs could effect ranking and quality as it is duplicated. Can anyone offer any advice with this?
Technical SEO | | Ian_W0 -
How to avoid duplicate content
Hi, I have a website which is ranking on page 1: www.oldname.com/landing-page But because of legal reason i had to change the name.
Technical SEO | | mikehenze
So i moved the landing page to a different domain.
And 301'ed this landing page to the new domain (and removed all products). www.newname.com/landing-page All the meta data, titles, products are still the same. www.oldname.com/landing-page is still on the same position
And www.newname.com/landing-page was on page 1 for 1 day and is now on page 4. What did i do wrong and how can I fix this?
Maybe remove www.oldname.com/landing-page from Google with Google Webmaster Central or not allow crawling of this page with .htaccess ?0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi, i work in joomla and my site is www.in2town.co.uk I have been looking at moz tools and it is showing i have over 600 pages of duplicate content. The problem is shown below and i am not sure how to solve this, any help would be great, | Benidorm News http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm-news/Page-2 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-102 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-103 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-104 9 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-106 28 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-11 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-112 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-114 45 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-115 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-116 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-12 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-120 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-123 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-13 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-130 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-131 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-132 31 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-140 4 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-141 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-21 10 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-22 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-23 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-26 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-271 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-274 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-277 50 21 2 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-28 50 21 2 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-29 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-310 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-341 21 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-342 4 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-343 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-345 1 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-346 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-348 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-349 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-350 50 16 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-351 50 19 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-82 24 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town 50 20 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-10 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-100 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-101 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-105 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-107 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-108 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-109 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-110 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-111 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-113 |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Help with duplicate title tags.
Hi Just going through Seomoz crawl diagnostics for one of my clients sites & see that the title tags for over 2,000 pages are the same due to the way there site software generates the titles using php, examples : **home page** = <title>Home - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> other page = <title>A0 Frames - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> So as you can see the page titles have the page name given to the beginning of the title which is fine as they have the keyword, then the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount Now if i take out the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount the home page is going to have just the word Home which is rubbish & the other pages will have the keyword which is better but not great, just wondered if any one has a better solution?.
Technical SEO | | askshopper0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, we need some help on resolving this duplicate content issue,. We have redirected both domains to this magento website. I guess now Google considered this as duplicate content. Our client wants both domain name to go to the same magento store. What is the safe way of letting Google know these are same company? Or this is not ideal to do this? thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
Help With Joomla Duplicate Content
Need another set of eyes on my site from someone with Joomla experience. I'm running Joomla 2.5 (latest version) and SEOmoz is giving my duplicate content errors on a lot of my pages. I checked my sitemap, I checked my menus, and I checked my links, and I can't figure out how SEOmoz is finding the alternate paths to my content. Home page is: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/ There's only one menu at the top. Take the first link "Dania Beach" under fishing charters for example. This generates the SEF url: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/fishing-charters/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html Somehow SEOmoz (and presumably all other robots) are finding duplicate content at: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html SEOmoz says the referrer is the homepage/root. The first URL is constructed using the menu aliases. The second one is constructed using the Joomla category and article alias. Where is it getting this and how can I stop it? <colgroup><col width="601"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NoahC0 -
Product category paging
Hi, My product categories have 2-3 pages each. I have paging implemented with rel=next and rel=prev. from some reason Google GWT now reports the pages as having duplicate titles and description. Should I be worried? Should I set a different title like "blue category - page x" ? Thanx, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
Duplicate Page Title
The crawl of my website http://www.aboutaburningfire.com revealed an error showing a duplicate page title. Can someone please explain to me how to fix this? I'm not sure what it means or how to fix it. | House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/ 1 Pending Pending House Church Chicago, Organic Church, Illinois http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/index.html |
Technical SEO | | severity0