Duplicity Problems - What to do with similar products in e-commerce?
-
Hello,
I have an eCommerce website with hundreds of similar products. On some occasions, besides for their measurements they are completely identical.
The titles are kept different by using the stock reference and the meta descriptions also use their measurements.
However, I'm gettingDuplicate Page Content errors by the MOZ crawler.
This is more than understandable since the products are very similar -
WHAT SHOULD I DO???I noticed a similar situation in BlueNile (the diamond ecommerce site) - They have numerous almost identical pages, see example:
http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02424873
http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02430168
For some reason, they did on each page a canonical to it's self...
I wanted to add...
It is impossible to add different descriptive texts due to the amount of products and to the rapidness they are sold (each product is unique - similar to the diamonds in the BlueNile example).
-
Dear Cyrus,
I completely agree that there is no good and added value with the stock id and measurements for Google but I felt like I had no choice.
I didn't want to start putting canonical between the pages because every other day an item is sold and then I would need to change the canonical to a similar existing item.
Are you saying that when a page makes a canonical to himself Google does not index it? Or treats it as a non original page (a copied page) even if I don't specify from where it is copied?
Please see the following question I asked that is about this matter and got a different response: http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-there-a-reason-to-put-a-canonical-to-yourself-interesting-case
Thanks
-
First, let me explain the SEOmoz duplicate content errors. These are issued anytime the HTML of a page is 95% similar to another page (this means the entire code, not just the text). It sounds like this is what is happening in your case.
Blue Nile solves this dilemma with the canonical tag. They are basically telling the search engines to consolidate all the pages into one for ranking purposes. The downside of this is that any page that doesn't point to itself isn't going to rank.
You stated that each title and description are differentiated using the "stock reference" and "measurements." The big question is... are these important for ranking? By this I mean do your customers search Google for your products by stock number and/or measurements?
If it were me, and without knowing more about your situation, I would try to consolidate your product pages as much as possible and use the canonical tag, similar to Blue Nile, on near-duplicate pages (strictly speaking, Google states the canonical tag is only for exact duplicates, but in the real world they are more flexible)
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Thanks for the reply but I am unable to create the 40% unique content.
My case is exactly like the BlueNile sample I gave on top...
These are extremely similar products but still each is unique because of slight differences (that are important to the buyers). I have thousands of products and each product is one of a kind - when it is sold - it is removed to the "sold items" section.
There is no way (and no point since each product can be sold once) to write a description to so many products that are constantly changing.
-
Your errors can be incurred for a number of reasons. You need to ensure you have a enough unique content per page, If you only have a few words or character of text related to any particular item and only a few unique words in the Title tag you will be flagged for duplication. Expand unique text where you can and ensure only Primary Brand Keywords are in the Title tag such that each page should have a majority of unique text. If your URLs are dynamic in nature investigate opportunities to make them Human Readable and in a structured format. SEOmoz has written numerous guides on URL structure. Place unique content wherever you can in images files names, alt text etc... Think minimum of 40% content differential per page including the site template. Too many links in a navigation can impact you if you have limited body content on a page.
-
It looks like on those two examples its just the table% and depth % that are different? Any way you could just combine the similar products, and just make it a option to select the different table % and depth%?
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
-
Galleries and duplicate content
Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!0 -
E-commerce site, one product multiple categories best practice
Hi there, We have an e-commerce shopping site with over 8000 products and over 100 categories. Some sub categories belong to multiple categories - for example, A Christmas trees can be under "Gardening > Plants > Trees" and under "Gifts > Holidays > Christmas > Trees" The product itself (example: Scandinavian Xmas Tree) can naturally belong to both these categories as well. Naturally these two (or more) categories have different breadcrumbs, different navigation bars, etc. From an SEO point of view, to avoid duplicate content issues, I see the following options: Use the same URL and change the content of the page (breadcrumbs and menus) based on the referral path. Kind of cloaking. Use the same URL and display only one "main" version of breadcrumbs and menus. Possibly add the other "not main" categories as links to the category / product page. Use a different URL based on where we came from and do nothing (will create essentially the same content on different urls except breadcrumbs and menus - there's a possibiliy to change the category text and page title as well) Use a different URL based on where we came from with different menus and breadcrumbs and use rel=canonical that points to the "main" category / product pages This is a very interesting issue and I would love to hear what you guys think as we are finalizing plans for a new website and would like to get the most out of it. Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arikbar0 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
URL for New Product
Hi, We are creating a section on our established existing website to display our new marketplace product & associated category pages. This marketplace will be a section of the site where our users can sell online training courses that they've created. It will be branded on our site as the Marketplace. Is it important to include 'marketplace' in the URL? Or would it be better to include a relevant keyword such as 'training-courses' instead? Or both? I've assumed I shouldn't use both as that would increase the length of the URLs and number of subfolders.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0 -
Duplicate description problem in Wordpress.
Webmaster tools is flagging up duplicate descriptions for the page http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts. The page is one page in the wordpress page editor and the web designer set it up so that I can add new live acts from a seperate page editor on the left menu and that feeds into the page 'live-acts'. (it says under template 'live-acts-feed'. The problem is as I add more acts it creates new url's eg http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/page/2 and http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/page/3 etc... I use the all in one SEO pack and webmaster tools tells me that page 2/3/4/ etc all have the same description. How can I overcome this? I can't write new descriptions for each page as the all in one SEO pack will only allow me to enter one for the page 'live-acts'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0 -
Best Product URL For Indexing
My proposed URL: mydomain.com/products/category/subcategory/product detail Puts my products 4 levels deep. Is this too deep to get my products indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
How to fix duplicated urls
I have an issue with duplicated pages. Should I use cannonical tag and if so, how? Or should change the page titles? This is causing my pages to compete with each other in the SERPs. 'Paradisus All Inclusive Luxury Resorts - Book your stay at Paradisus Resorts' is also used on http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5889 line 9 | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5891 line 9 | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5910 line 9 | | http://www.paradisus.com/booking-template.php?codigoHotel=5911 line 9 |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0