Duplicate Product Descriptions
-
Hi All,
After a bit of advice please, we will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product. Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique.
The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc.
I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO.
My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content? If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed.
Many thanks in advance for any advice.
-
What could you do if the Duplicate description was the actual wording " Product Description " ? Using BigCommerce they have it set up this way and It's rather baffling it is so.
-
Hey,
I was thinking the exact same thing! possible I could divide the fabrics up into types to break it down a little more.
Thanks again.
-
Thanks Tim,
I have been looking at ways to do something similar and our developer guys is login to take a look at whats involved. For now it looks like I'm going to have to make the text as unique as possible.
Thanks again.
-
I agree with Tim, the option selecting would make the most sense, but I can understand how 300 choices would be rather overwhelming in a drop down. Is there a way you can sub-divide the color options down?
-
Ah so each chair can have up to 300+ fabrics available to it. That is a very customisable chair. I was expecting you to say a few colour options, a few leg options and few fabric options etc, not into the hundreds. You could make the UX/UI relatively easy to understand if presented in a nice step by step guide once a user has landed on the chairs page. e.g. Step 1: Choose your legs, Step 2: Choose your fabric , Step 3: Choose a colour.
If this is a definate no go In that case I would imagine that you would need to try and do a little more on the unique content front for each item. I know that will be a pain, but getting your H1, title and first paragraphs, product alt tags, product schema to include the product name will be imperative. If the rest of the product is similar it will be very hard to make each totally unique.
This is a great example I just found - http://www.sofasbysaxon.com/the-range/customiser/sofas/typist-chair. Even though it could do with a little refinement
-
Thanks both for the quick reply!
I have considered creating just one product with multiple variations but to have 300+ fabric variations, 4 leg style variations, 6 leg colour variations and 2 facing variations would make the UI ugly and almost impossible to use.
If I were to change the long description to also include the fabric colour would that make it unique enough? i.e 3 out of c.300 words would be different.
Thanks
-
Hmmmmm 300+ pages all with very similar content. This would make it difficult to canonicalise to just one product of each type.
Rather than having lots of different pages with just blue chair, green chair, red chair. Could you simply not just have chair and then as an option the colour within the page.
So
Leather High Back Chair.
Price - $£200
Options - red, cream, black , tan [make a selection box/check box to choose] This way you have just one item that can be optimised be the main item.Hope that helps.
-
I would suggest that either you make the fabric and finishes part of the long description (making each one unique) or approach this as one product (and therefore one page) with different fabric and finish options.
If you do end up going with the similar description, could you make a main page for the product with sub-pages for the various different page for the fabrics and finishes and use the canonical tag to point at the main page.
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
-
Duplicate pages on wordpress
I am doing SEO on a site which is running on WP. And it has all pages and categories duplicates on domain.com/site/ However, as it got crawled I saw that all domain.com/ pages have rel=canonical with main page tag (does it mean something?). Thing is I will fix permalinks structure and I think WP automatically redirects if it is changed from /?page_id= to /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/ Isn't there something I miss? Second problems is a forum. After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ (fortunately, there are no domain.com/site/forum duplicates). What could be an easy solution to this?
Technical SEO | | OVJ0 -
Duplicate Content Problems
Hi I am new to the seomoz community I have been browsing for a while now. I put my new website into the seomoz dashboard and out of 250 crawls I have 120 errors! So the main problem is duplicate content. We are a website that finds free content sources for popular songs/artists. While seo is not our main focus for driving traffic I wanted to spend a little time to make sure our site is up to standards. With that said you can see when two songs by an artist are loaded. http://viromusic.com/song/125642 & http://viromusic.com/song/5433265 seomoz is saying that it is duplicate content even though they are two completely different songs. I am not exactly sure what to do about this situation. We will be adding more content to our site such as a blog, artist biographies and commenting maybe this will help? Although if someone was playing multiple bob marley songs the biography that is loaded will also be the same for both songs. Also when a playlist is loaded http://viromusic.com/playlist/sldvjg on the larger playlists im getting an error for to many links on the page. (some of the playlists have over 100 songs) any suggestions? Thanks in advance and any tips or suggestions for my new site would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mikecrib10 -
NOINDEX,FOLLOW on product pages
Hi Can I have people's thoughts on something please. We sell wedding stationery and whilst we can generate lots of good content describing a particular range of stationery we can't relistically differentiate at a product level. So imagine we have three ranges Range 1 - A Bird Range 2 - A Heart Range 3 - A Flower Within each of these ranges we would have invitations, menus, place cards, magnets etc. The ranges vary quite alot so we can write good textual keyword rich descriptions that attract traffic (i.e. one about the bird, one about the heart and one about the flower). However the individual products within a range just reflect the design for the range as a whole (as all items in a range match). Therefore we can't just copy the content down to the product level and if we just describe the generic attributes of the products they will alll be very similar. We have over 1,000 "products" easily so I am conscious of creating too much duplication over the site in case Mr Panda comes to call. So I was thinking that I "might" NOINDEX, FOLLOW the product pages to avoid this duplication and put lots of effort into making my category pages much better and content rich. The site would be smaller in the index BUT I do not really expect to generate traffic from the product pages because they are not branded items and any searches looking for particular features of our stationery would be picked up, much more effectively, by the category pages. Any thoughts on this one? Gary
Technical SEO | | gtrotter6660 -
How to get rid of duplicate content
I have duplicate content that looks like http://deceptionbytes.com/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&link=932fea0640143bf08fe157d3570792a56dcc1284 - however I have 50 of these all with different numbers on the end. Does this affect the search engine optimization and how can I disallow this in my robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | Mishelm1 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi everyone, I have an issue determining what type of duplicate content I have. www.example.com/index.php?mact=Calendar,m57663,default,1&m57663return_id=116&m57663detailpage=&m57663year=2011&m57663month=6&m57663day=19&m57663display=list&m57663return_link=1&m57663detail=1&m57663lang=en_GB&m57663returnid=116&page=116 Since I am not an coding expert, to me it looks like it is a URL parameter duplicate content. Is it? At the same time "return_id" would makes me think it is a session id duplicate content. I am confused about how to determine different types of duplicate content, even by reading articles on Seomoz about it: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content. Could someone help me on how to recognize different types of duplicate content? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Almost Duplicate Product names (READ almost!)
Hi Mozzers, Here is a dilemma I thought I'd put forward and see how you guys would handle the situations. I'm working on a comparison website on which many of of the product names are very similar. There are circa 2000 products, of which many have similar names. Here are a few of the product names for example; Airsprung Enigma 5ft Mattress Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress Silentnight Double Nova 6ft Mattress The Product name has been used in the page title of the product pages as show below; Compare Prices on the Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress SEOmoz is highlighting these pages as having Duplicate Page Titles (and meta descriptions as a similar approach has been used). How would you handle this situation? Cheers Aran
Technical SEO | | Entrusteddev0 -
Strange duplicate content issue
Hi there, SEOmoz crawler has identified a set of duplicate content that we are struggling to resolve. For example, the crawler picked up that this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/industry-insight/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career is a duplicate of this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career. The latter page's content is the original and can be found in the CMS admin area whilst the former page is the duplicate and has no entry in the CMS. So we don't know where to begin if the "duplicate" page doesn't exist in the CMS. The crawler states that this page www. creative-choices.co.uk/industry-insight/inside/creative-writing is the referrer page. Looking at it, only the original page's link is showing on the referrer page, so how did the crawler get to the duplicate page?
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0 -
Duplicate Content and Canonical use
We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications. Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course. Cheers Martin
Technical SEO | | Martin_S0