How to deal with duplicates on an e-commerce website

[iBags]

Hi guys,

So we have an e-commerce website and we have some products that are exactly the same but come in different colours. Lets say for example we have a Samsonite Chronolite and this bag comes in 55cm, 65cm and 75cm variations. The same bag also may come in 4 different colours. The bags are the same and therefore have the same information besides maybe the title tag varying due to the size and colour. But the descriptions are the same.

How do I avoid Google thinking I am duplicating pages or have duplicated pages. Google things we have duplicated when the scenario is as I have explained.

Any suggestions?

Best regards,

[iBags]

Thanks dude. But there's a of these pages, the damage control is just too much. But if I set products as configurable can Google read the products that are not visible individually or it just reads the configurable. We use Magento so it creates simple product variations which are then used to create the configurable. Like if you visit samsonite.com they have different products of different variations but it is one product that is configurable.

[Ikusa]

Couldn't have said it better myself.  This is exactly the correct answer.

[TomRayner]

Hi there

If you're going to persist with separate landing pages for all size/colour varations, then you should make use of both the rel=canonical, rel=rev and rel=next meta tags in the of your HTML.

Choose one URL to serve as the "master page" - the one that you would like to rank if you intended to.

Starting with that page, add a canonical tag that points to that URL and then a rel=next tag for your first product variation.  For example:

For the first variation page (product-variation-1), you want to add these tags:

For the second (product-variation-2):

And so on in a sequence until they are all covered.

The reason why I recommend using a canonical tag and the prev/next tags is to be absolutely sure the commands are adhered to.  It is better practice, in this example, to use prev/next tags - however that is just for Google.  Bing has a hard time adhering to that command and will sometimes flat out ignore it, which could lead to duplication issues on that search engine.

For further reading there's a very helpful Google Webmasters post on the topic right here.

Hope this helps.