SEOMOZ and non-duplicate duplicate content

[fretts]

Hi all,

Looking through the lovely SEOMOZ report, by far its biggest complaint is that of perceived duplicate content.  Its hard to avoid given the nature of eCommerce sites that oestensibly list products in a consistent framework.

Most advice about duplicate content is about canonicalisation, but thats not really relevant when you have two different products being perceived as the same.

Thing is, I might have ignored it but google ignores about 40% of our site map for I suspect the same reason.  Basically I dont want us to appear "Spammy".  Actually we do go to a lot of time to photograph and put a little flavour text for each product (in progress).

I guess my question is, that given over 700 products, why 300ish of them would be considered duplicates and the remaning not?

Here is a URL and one of its "duplicates" according to the SEOMOZ report:

http://www.1010direct.com/DGV-DD1165-970-53/details.aspx
http://www.1010direct.com/TDV-019-GOLD-50/details.aspx

Thanks for any help people

[DocdataCommerce]

The point I'm trying to get across is this:

"I asked the question of why these pages are considered duplicate, the answer appears to be : because textually they are even if visually they are not."

I don't think that's the complete answer, or even the most important part of the answer. Surely having mostly similar content across pages won't help, but as I've tried to point out, there are other factors that come into play here. It's not just about the content, but putting the content into context for the search engines. In order for them to understand what it is they're looking it, there's more that's important than just the content.

Michel

[fretts]

I think this highlights the fundamental problem with SEO and
eCommerce sites.

We are all aware that the ultimate aim for search engines and
therefore ultimately SEO is to add value to users. But is "value" the
same for an eCommerce site as it is for a blog, or a travel information site or
a site offering information on health and advice?

In my opinion, it is not. If I am looking to make a purchase, I
am looking for a site that is responsive, easy to navigate, has good imagery to
help me visualise, is secure and doesn’t clutter with in-your-face promotional
info, and of course offers value for money.

Unique content therefore doesn’t really factor into it too much.  Its hard enough for us, but I can only imagine how difficult it is for a company selling screws or rope, just how much creativity does that take to provide unique content for 3.5 inch brass screws over 2.5 inch steel ones?

The current mantra is to stop worrying about SEO tricks, and
focus on building a site with value. But this particular issue is an indication
we are still not there with that utopia yet.

For example, as pointed out in the posts above .. these pages are considered duplicate, because by percentage the variable information is minimal; If you look at our product page we put the functionality of filling in your prescription below the product to make it
easier for the customer, but in order to solve the "percentage unique" issue, we would need to move that onto another page. Basically, we need to reduce value (convenience) to appear to add value (uniqueness).

Anyway, little point complaining, I asked the question of why these pages are considered duplicate, the answer appears to be : because textually they are even if visually they are not.

I could be worrying about nothing, I believe all these pages are indexed (through crawling), its just a good proportion of our sitemap is being overlooked, I am assuming its perceived  duplication as suggested in SEOMOZ.  That in turn makes me concerned google is marking us down as spammy.

I appreciate all your comments.

Thanks

Paul

[DocdataCommerce]

I do not agree. I see these kinds of pages on e-commerce websites on a daily basis. For webshops that sell only a certain kind of product, almost all product pages will look alike.

In this case, the H1 is different, the page title is different, and the description is different. This is only a small portion of the page but that's not uncommon, so I would argue that it cannot be just that.

I would look into URLs, marking up your data using http://schema.org/Product, possibly making small changes to accomodate the tags. For instance splitting up brand, color etc. so that you can mark them accordingly.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Tom has this spot on. Google doesn't only look for direct duplication, but also very similar, and these really are I'm afraid.

You need to find ways to make each page unique in its own right - let Google see that no two pages are the same and there is a real reason to rank them.

[DocdataCommerce]

I wonder if the details.aspx has something to do with it?

www.1010direct.com/TDV-019-GOLD-50/details.aspx
www.1010direct.com/DGV-DD1165-970-53/details.aspx

Basically, both pages are called details.aspx. Depending on how you look at it, you have 2 pages that are named the same (with mostly similar content, though not unusual for e-commerce websites) in different subfolders. I'm not sure if there's some kind of difference in the way Moz works, and if that's part of why Moz marks this as duplicate content?

Are you unable to create 'prettier' URL's? Such as:

www.1010direct.com/tim-dilsen-019-gold-50-glasses.aspx
www.1010direct.com/dolce-gabbana-dd1165-970-53-glasses.aspx

With or without the aspx of course.

[TomRayner]

I'm not surprised Moz is flagging those pages as duplicate content and I wouldn't be totally surprised if Google did in the future.

Put it this way, the pages are identical bar for a single sentence title description, a price and roughly a 20 word section describing the product.  Everything else is identical. It's duplicate.

Look at it another through Google's eyes.  Here's how the two pages look when crawled by Google:

http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.1010direct.com%2FDGV-DD1165-970-53%2Fdetails.aspx&button0.x=51&button0.y=12&button0=Simple

http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.1010direct.com%2FTDV-019-GOLD-50%2Fdetails.aspx&button0.x=58&button0.y=16&button0=Simple

(If that doesn't work, try yourself at http://www.seo-browser.com/)

Just look at how much text and HTML is shared between the two pages.  Yes, there are key differences on the pages (namely the product), but the Google bot nor the Mozbot is going to recognise those elements when it crawls it.

Presuming Google ignores the site nav, it still has a bunch of text and crawlable elements that are shared - pretty much everything under the product description.  It doesn't see the individual images and the flavour text is frankly too small to make any sort of dent in the duplicate content %.

I'd seriously recommend at revising how your product pages look - there's far too much repeated content per page (you can still promote these things on each page but in a much, much smaller way) and the individual descriptions for the products, in my eyes, are not substantial enough.