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
-
Purchasing duplicate content
Morning all, I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well. I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | BackPack851 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Schema showing up in product listing?
I have added schema to my product page as follows: Example product description ..... and so forth. However, the schema is showing up on the product page itself. How do I keep the schema on the SERP page, but not on the product page? My client doesn't want it to affect the site design. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DWallace0 -
174 Duplicate Content Errors
How do I go about fixing these errors? There are all related to my tags. Thank you in advance for any help! Lisa
Technical SEO | | lisarein0 -
Duplicate Content Problem!
Hi folks, I have a quite awkward problem. Since a few weeks a get a huge amount of "duplicate content errors" in my MOZ crawl reports. After a while of looking for the error I thought of the domains I've bought additionally. So I went to Google and typed in site:myotherdomains.com The results was as I expected that my original website got indexed with my new domains aswell. That means: For example my original website was index with www.domain.com/aboutus - Then I bought some additional domains which are pointing on my / folder. What happened is that I also get listed with: www.mynewdomains.com/com How can I fix that? I tried a normal domain redirect but it seems as this doesn't help as when I am visiting www.mynewdomains.com the domain doesnt change in my browser to www.myoriginaldomain.com but stays with it ... I was busy the whole day to find a solution but I am kinda desperate now. If somebody could give me advice it would be much appreciated. Mike
Technical SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Duplicate Content
The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress). so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way. thanks
Technical SEO | | vansy0 -
How do I eliminate indexed products?
Please help! We got clobbered by Penguin and are at risk of having to close down after 10 years. We have been trying to figure out why and believe now it might be because of duplicate content. We added 2" inserts in March (over 500): http://www.trophycentral.com/inserts1.html Even though each is a different products, SEOMOZ is saying they are considered duplicate content. Given the timing, we think this might be the cause, even though it is totally legitimate. Question - since these are now indexed and since we can't easily add content quickly, what is the best way to handle this situation? A no-index tag? Is there a way to let Google know that their algorithm is detroying legitimate businesses??
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0