Hello I have an ecommerce site where many of the products are variations.
-
Hello I have an ecommerce site. Many of the products are variations. I am using the Yoast Woo Commerce plugin. My meta descriptions for each product category might only vary for length for example.
10 foot microphone cable: Hand soldered heavy-duty 24 gauge cable braided shield, CBI nickel XLR connectors Bulk pricing - Call for your price 615-406-3255
20 foot microphone cable: Hand soldered heavy-duty 24 gauge cable braided shield, CBI nickel XLR connectors Bulk pricing - Call for your price 615-406-3255
From a Moz report I am getting tons of duplicate content issues. What can I do to correct this issue? Thank you for your help.
-
Thank you.
-
Thank you. My concern was coming up with the best possible meta description and then just changing length and then cutting and pasting the description into each page. I am also figuring that once my indexed page increase with more product the varies widely this will not ba as much of a problem.
-
Thank you
-
As Dana said, this is a pretty typical issue in e-commerce, particularly for merchants with large numbers of SKUs that are pretty much the same thing with very slight variations. Think about trying to sell something like light bulbs.
In the recent past we have basically reinterpreted an old-school, spammy SEO technique that actually has a pretty useful, legitimate purpose in this scenario. Spinning text. You can use the variables from your product to create "unique-ish" content that will likely pass a duplicate content sniff test.
For example, there are many ways to write your call to action and it could be written like the below and run through a content spinner to produce different variations--
{{Call|Call us|Call Today|Telephone us|Ring us}} for {{the best|your|our best|daily best}} price 615-406-3255
Disclaimer: I'm certainly not endorsing this as a way to fool the search engines, but sometimes trying to get enough unique content to interest the algorithms takes a little creative effort.
-
Hi Edward,
This is a very common problem in eCommerce. Although I don't have experience with Yoast's Woo Commerce, I imagine that there are several possibilities on how to deal with this issue.
Depending on how you handle your inventory there are a few options.
If you assign specific part numbers to all the different "versions" (i.e. lengths, colors, flavors, sizes, etc), which I think is probably most often the case, I would look in Woo Commerce to see if there is a way to set up a "Parent Child" relationship between a master product page and all the various versions of a product that might be available. Usually this results in creating a "Parent" part number where the master page "lives" and then all the separate version become children of that page. When someone makes their selection, the system pulls the specific part number corresponding with their selection and puts it in their cart. Technically, the children products still have "pages," but if you use a canonical tag on the parent page, leave it off the individual children "pages" and also hide those pages from being crawled and indexed, you will have solved your problem. There are a number of ways to keep those "child" product pages from being crawled and indexed, either via robots.txt or "no crawl, noindex."
The other choice, which is also probably available in Woo Commerce, is to set up a product page (again, you would have to create an Item ID or Part number for it that won't necessarily be a real product in your inventory). Then, create options for all the different versions of the items that are then presented to visitors via a drop down menu, radio buttons, etc. Again, you can usually correspond these product "options" to specific part numbers in your database. The difference is really presentation. When you use a drop-down menu selector, your visitor will only be able to select one part number for their shopping cart at a time. They would have to revisit the page and re-select different options if they wanted the same item, for example, in different lengths. The Parent/Child solution is nice is you want to allow your visitors to order 5 10-foot cables and 6 20-foot cables all on the same page at the same time.
Every platform is a little different. I have used these solutions in both Volusion, 3Dcart and seen them in Magento. It can take some back and forth to get things laid out and functioning the way you want, but from an SEO viewpoint the work is worth it because the "hub" pages that you in effect end up creating have a lot more value to searchers than having to visit nearly identical pages for cables that are exactly the same, but differ only in lengths.
Long answer I know. But I really hope it helps!
Dana
-
Moz is going by a percentage threshold - if more than a certain percent is the same, it's duplicate. Revise your meta descriptions or just accept having it marked as duplicate. Duplicate meta descriptions aren't that big of an issue.
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
-
Site Hack In Meta Description
Hey MOZ Community, I am looking for some help in identifying where the following meta description is coming from on this home page - https://www.apins.com. I have scrubbed through the page source without being able to locate where the content is being pulled from. The website is built on WordPress and metas were updated using Yoast, but I am wondering if an installed plugin could be the culprit. On top of this, I have had a developer take a look for the "hack" and they have assured that the issue has been removed. I have submitted the URL in GSC a couple of times to be re-indexed but have not had much luck. Any thoughts would be much appreciated, the displayed description is below. The health screening plays http://buyviagraonlineccm.com/ a significant and key role in detecting potentially life-threatening illnesses such as cancer, heart ...
Technical SEO | | jordankremer0 -
Can you use a seperate url for a interior product page on a site?
I have a friend that has a health insurance agency site. He wants to add a new page, for child health care insurance to his existing site. But the issue is, he brought a new URL; insurancemykidnow.com and he want's to use it for the new page. Now, I'm not sure I'm right on this, but I don't think that can be done? I'm I wrong? = Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Coppell0 -
Mobile site not ranking
Hello, Our main site ranks well for all the keyword terms, and yet, our mobile site is buried. It is a "m." configuration, and I am wondering if it is a question of not using the correct programming language to get it there? Or if the redirects to the main site should relate differently? I have tried to read up on the topic of mobile site SEO and cannot find (or understand) the answer? Could someone please help? Thanks so much in advance!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Googlebot cannot access your site
"At the end of July I received a message in my Google webmaster tools saying "Googlebot can't access your site" We checked our robots.txt file and removed a line break in it, and then I had Google Fetch the file again. I have not received any more messages since then. When we created the website I wrote all of the content and optimized each page for about 1 local keyword. A few weeks after I checked my keywords and did have a few on the first page of google. Since then almost all of them have completely disappeared. Because we had not link building effort I would not expect to still be on the first page, but I should definitely be seeing them before the 5th or even 10th page of Google. The address is http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com I'm not sure if these horrible results have something to do with the message from Google or something else. The problem is this client now wants to sign a contract with us for SEO and I really have no Idea what happened and if I will be able to figure it out. The main keyword for my home page is tile pompano beach and I aslo was using Pompano Beach Tile store for the About page which was previously on the first page of Google. Does anyone have some input?
Technical SEO | | DTOSI0 -
Dealing with Dead Pages on an Ecommerce Site
Hello everyone! I'm working on a project for a small jewelry store. They have a store in North Carolina and an ecommerce site (on Shopify - which I loathe!). I'm not exactly an SEO expert, but the client likes the way I handle social media and I know enough to get them much farther down the road than they are now. The big problem is that most everything sold is handmade and one of a kind. So, the site has LOTS of dead links. I'd love everyone's suggestions on how to: Best avoid this in the first place as new products are added and promoted via Facebook, Twitter, blog posts and so on Suggestions for managing the sold items - I don't think it seems wise to leave them up as "SOLD" The site is http://www.laurajamesjewelry.com I'm grateful for your assistance! And look forward to sharpening my SEO skills. ~Robin
Technical SEO | | RobinBertelsen0 -
Any good ideas on how to quickly rank a new site for a new product laucnh?
Hi, I'm thinking of examples like the wii u - when it was announced all wii u sites were new. what ways could one get an edge quickly when competing against other sites without a great deal of authority on this 'new' keyword? obvious ones are social bookmarking, what else could easily be used to quickly (<24hrs) at least help a bit in non competitive kws?
Technical SEO | | dmn020 -
Moving Duplicate Sites
Apologies in advance for the complexity. My client, company A, has purchased company B in the same industry, with A and B having separate domains. Current hosting arrangement combines registrar and hosting functions in 1 account so as to allow both domains to point to a common folder, with the result that identical content is displayed for both A & B. The current site is kind of an amalgam of A and B. Company A has decided to rebrand and completely absorb company B. The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A. The current (only) hosting package is Windows, and I am creating a new site and moving them to Linux with another hosting company. I can use 301's for A , but not for B as it is a separate domain and currently shares a hosting package with A. How can I best preserve the link juice that domain B has? The only conclusion I can come up with is to set up separate Linux hosting for B which will allow for the use of 301's. Does anyone have a better idea?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0