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
-
Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail
Hi, I have a category page I want to rank. This page has 24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same.
Technical SEO | | amastone
I want to use canonical tag in any product to the parent category.
Is this a right use of the canonical?
Category page I'm talking about is : Finger bits If I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages. thanks marco0 -
Product Code Error in Volusion
I started working with about 800+ 404 errors in September after we migrated our site to Volusion 13. There is a recurring 404 error that I can't trace inside of our source code or in our Sitemap. I don't know what is causing this error so I have no way of knowing how to fix it. Tech support at Volusion has been less than helpful so any feed back would be appreciated. | http://www.apelectric.com/Generac-6438-Guardian-Series-11kW-p/{1} | The error is seemingly starting with the product code. The addendum at the end of the URL "p/" should be followed by the product code. In this example, 6438. Instead, the code is being automatically populated with %7B1%7D Has anyone else this issue with Volusion or does this look familiar across any other platform?
Technical SEO | | MonicaOConnor0 -
Seo For Forum Sites
I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?
Technical SEO | | tutarmi0 -
Canonical URLs in an eCommerce site
We have a website with 4 product categories (1. ice cream parlors, 2. frozen yogurt shops etc.). A few sub-categories (e.g. toppings, smoothies etc.) and the products contained in those are available in more than one product category (e.g. the smoothies are available in the "ice cream parlors" category, but also in the "frozen yogurt shops" category). My question: Unfortunately the website has been designed in a way that if a subcategory (e.g. smoothies) is available in more than 1 category, then itself (the subcategory page) + all its product pages will be automatically visible under various different urls. So now I have several urls for one and the same product: www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|FROZEN-YOGURT-SHOPS-391-2-5 and http://www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|ICE-CREAM-PARLORS-391-1-5 And also several ones for one and the same sub-category (they all include exactly the same set of products): http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-1-12-0-4 (the smoothies contained in the ice cream parlors category) http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-2-12-0-4 (the same smoothies, contained in the frozen yogurt shops category) This is happening with around 100 pages. I would add canonical tags to the duplicates, but I'm afraid that by doing so, the category (frozen yogurt shops) that contains several non-canonical sub-categories (smoothies, toppings etc.) , might not show up anymore in search results or become irrelevant for Google when searching for example for "products for frozen yoghurt shops". Do you know if this would be actually the case? I hope I explained it well..
Technical SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Should we include ANY generic product descriptions on our site?
Until recently all of our product pages (we run an eCommerce site) had product descriptions copied directly off the manufacturer's sites. Obviously this isn't good from an SEO perspective, so we were planning to write our own original copy. My question is: should we keep the manufacturer's copy too? This is often good, useful content from a customer's perspective, but obviously it's not original. Any help appreciated! Alex
Technical SEO | | reddogmusic0 -
How do I eliminate indexed products?
Please help! We got clobbered by Penguin and are at risk of having to close down after 10 years. We have been trying to figure out why and believe now it might be because of duplicate content. We added 2" inserts in March (over 500): http://www.trophycentral.com/inserts1.html Even though each is a different products, SEOMOZ is saying they are considered duplicate content. Given the timing, we think this might be the cause, even though it is totally legitimate. Question - since these are now indexed and since we can't easily add content quickly, what is the best way to handle this situation? A no-index tag? Is there a way to let Google know that their algorithm is detroying legitimate businesses??
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Too many on page links
Hi All, As we all know, having to much links on a page is an obstacle for search engine crawlers in terms of the crawl allowance. My category pages are labeled as pages with to many "one page" links by the SEOmoz crawler. This probably comes from the fact that each product on the category page has multiple links (on the image and model number). Now my question is, would it help to setup a text-link with a clickable area as big as the product area? This means every product gets just one link. Would this help get the crawlers deeper in these pages and distribute the link-juice better? Or is Google smart enough already to figure out that two links to the same product page shouldn't be counted as two? Thanks for your replies guys. Rich
Technical SEO | | Horlogeboetiek0 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670