Multiple products with legitimate duplicate descriptions
-
We are redeveloping a website for a card company who have far too many products to write unique descriptions for each. Even if they could I don't think it would be beneficial to the user. However they do have unique descriptions for each range which is useful for users viewing an individual card.
Which is better practice:
a) Ignore the duplicate content issue and supply the user with info about the range
b) Provide clear enticing links to find out more about the range which will leave the individual card page a little void of content.
Many thanks
-
Many thanks Alex, already on all of the points mentioned above but always nice to get some validation for plans of action... half the time that's more satisfying than coming up with them!
-
Also make sure all your page titles are unique. While descriptions don't matter that much, titles should be unique or at the very least descriptive and targeted for your keywords.
-
Sounds like you have a good handle on it. As Mike recommends, focusing on the more category-style pages is definitely more appealing to a user looking to browse the site. At the end of the day, beyond SEO, the end-user is really what you care about. Another suggestion might be to make the single card pages more like category pages. Show cards from the same category, suggest similar cards or categories. Related links are one of the best ways to promote pageviews and get both the end-user as well as a googlebot interested in "crawling" more pages. That's a bonus on all fronts.
-
Sorry again I should have been clearer it is not really the meta data I am concerned about at this point more the benefit of on-page content. I think the bigger issue is that for organic search traffic card pages are almost redundant and focus, as Mike says should be on the range pages which should encourage browsing.
-
Although in additon there is the issue about the card page lacking in enticing content which could reduce the chance of a conversion. Becuase this is a predominently visual subject pehaps I am just worrying about the lack of text as it fundamentally goes against usual SEO rather than benfitting usability.
-
Apologies, I should have said greetings cards, so this is indeed very helpful, thank you
-
Meta descriptions won't get you penalized for duplicate content so there's no need to worry about that. The descriptions are really just what you see in the Google Search. Users are more likely to click a link that has a nice descriptive description that leads them into the content you're looking for. Of course a custom description is always best for each individual page/product, but in some cases the time isn't worth it.
I'm not sure what you mean with clear links on B, but A is a perfectly fine solution if there are just too many pages. A good options might be to create a generic description that uses the product name as a variable. ie: "My (Car) is red", "My (Cart) is red", etc.
-
What sort of cards are we talking about? I immediately think "greeting cards" when you say that but I don't want to just assume that's the case. But if it is then from a personal user experience standpoint I would say that I would be more likely to search a specific range & gain more from finding a category page for a range of cards in the SERPs than I would from a page with an individual card on it. I.E. I'm more likely to search "birthday cards" or "get well cards" or "thank you cards" than I would to search "that birthday card with a grumpy cat that has balloons and a smushed cake". In which case I'd say go with robust category pages and, if possible, consider canonicalizing the individual cards to the category if you're going to also use the content of the parent category on the individual pages. If it's not greeting cards... well then I wrote all of this for nothing. (unless its playing cards... what I wrote might work for that as well)
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
-
Would there be any benefit to creating multiple pages of the same content to target different titles?
Obviously, the duplicated pages would be canonical, but would there be a way of anchoring a page land by search term entry? For example: If you have a site that sells cars you could use this method but have a page that has (brand) cars for sale, finance options, best car for a family, how far will the (brand) car go for on a full tank and so on? Then making all the information blocks h2's but using the same H2s for the duplicated page titles. Then it gets complicated, If someone searches "best car for a family" and the page title for the duplicated page is clicked how would you anchor this user to the section of the page with this information? Could there be a benefit to doing this or would it just not work?
Algorithm Updates | | Evosite10 -
Rel canonical on other page instead of duplicate page. How Google responds?
Hi all, We have 3 pages for same topics. We decided to use rel canonical and remove old pages from search to avoid duplicate content. Out of these 3 pages....1 and 2 type of pages have more similar content where 3 type don't have. Generally we must use rel canonical between 1 and 2. But I am wondering what happens if I canonical between 1 and 3 while 2 has more similar content? Will Google respects it or penalise as we left the most similar page and used other page for canonical. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
HREFLANG for multiple country/language combinations
We have a site setup with English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. We offer these languages for every European country (over 30). Thus, there are 150 + different URL combinations, as we use the /country/language/ subdirectory path. Should I list out every combination in hreflang?Or should I simply choose the most applicable combinations (/de/de and fr/fr, etc.)? If we go the latter path, should I block google bot from crawling the atypical combinations? Best, Sam
Algorithm Updates | | JohnnyECCO0 -
Ctr question with home page and product pages
do you believe that the advantage of targeting a search term on the home page is now worse off than before? as I understand it ctr is a big factor now And as far as i can see if two pages are equal on page etc the better ctr will win out, the issue with the home page is the serp stars cannot be used hence the ctr on a product page will be higher? I feel if you where able to get a home page up quicker (1 year instead of two) you still lost out in the end due to the product page winning on ctr? do you think this is correct?
Algorithm Updates | | BobAnderson0 -
What would be the right website hosting solution for a global brand with multiple TLDs?
Hello everyone, we are preparing a global we strategy for our customer, who wants to focus on many local markets. They are present with their products in over 60 countries on all continents and they can cover 7 languages easily. They also own the TLDs in each main country. Our priority is to be not only found in Google, but also in all major local search engines, which are popular in each country. Our main concerns with this strategy are: How do we host the website locally for each country, so local search engines recognize the website as a local website? Also, is it that important? Is cloud hosting the right solution for this? We would have different server locations for each TLD/language. Surrounding countries would at least get a fast connection and download rate, if the server is located nearby. If yes, can you recommend any companies doing cloud hosting? Is it also wise to additionally redirect the user to the local server based on his/her location? Is there a risk of duplicate content or being recognized as a link spamming site (for having links to each other from different domains of the same site, the content will be in different languages, though) just by using this solution? We would, of course, keep the content separated by domain to avoid duplicate content. Any comments and ideas would be highly appreciated. Thanks, Wojtek
Algorithm Updates | | webeeline0 -
Duplicate Pate Content - 404's or 301's?
I deleted about 100 pages of stale content 6 months ago and they are currently returning 404's. The crawl diagnostics have pointed out 77 duplicate pages because of this. Should I redirect these as 301's to get rid of the error or keep them as 404's? Most of the pages still have some page authority but I don't want to get penalized. Just looking for the best solution. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | braunna0 -
Videos increase ranking of products in SERPS from Ecommerce Website
Just noticed something I've never seen before..and I just wanted to see if anyone else experienced this. I work for a 15000+ item eccommerce website, and today I noticed that on a few brand searches, several individual product pages were coming up. This is actually unusual because most of our individual item pages (including these) aren't ranked well enough to show up well in a brand search (and don't try to target brand terms either), but a correlation here was that both items contained videos referenced within. These were not videos hosted on our YouTube brand page either..these were videos done by separate manufacturers - one was hosted on their site, one on ours. Google actually pulled the snapshot of the video to the SERP as well... even though it was embedded within other product copy. Has anyone else noticed any preferential treatment given to effectively random items on your eCommerce website because it was augmented by video? I can assure you there was nothing otherwise unique about these products and they're not really that sought after. Neither item or url was new, and neither were the videos within. Also, this was a Universal Google search, not one for videos. (Sorry, I'm not allowed to reference directly). Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Blenny0 -
Why would my product pages no longer be indexed in Google?
Our UK site has 72 pages in our sitemap. 30 of them are product pages which take a productid parameter. Prior to 1st Feb 2011, all pages were indexed in Google but since then all of our product pages seem to have dropped from the index? If I check in webmaster tools, I can see that we have submitted 72 pages and 42 are indexed. I realise we should have some better url structuring and I'm working on that but do you have any ideas on how we can get our product poages back into googles index http://www.ebacdirect.com
Algorithm Updates | | ebacltd0