Duplicate pages and slight product variations
-
Hi, I'm new here, first post...
I've started working on an existing Magento website which is selling furniture. There are products such as leather dining chairs which have very detailed product descriptions. The problem is that there is separate a page for every colour the chair comes in (with exactly the same on-page text), so the page is effectively duplicated 5 times, one for red, one for blue etc... This is made even worse by the fact that the website builder has listed the products in multiple different categories. This means that the same basic product description is in use on maybe 20 or so pages.
How would you guys deal with product descriptions for multiple, very similar products where only the colour is different? There's also the problem of very similar title tags etc...
Thanks for any help. Very much appreciated.
J. -
It would help, but step back and ask yourself if writing a whole new description for a "red" widget is worth it? If color makes a big difference, then by all means go for it. Most cases, you're better with just a single page to list all your options. This page on Amazon demonstrates nicely
Unfortunately, I'm not an authority on Magento, but there may be some SEO plugins you could benefit from that might add canonical tags to those product pages.
At a minimum, I'd read Yoast's guide on Magento SEO:
http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/
And you might want to check out this canonical plugin for Magento:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Yoast/extension/906/canonical-url-s-for-magento
Hope this helps!
-
Thanks. I didn't think it would work...
The question is I suppose, how do you folks make five versions of the same product description totally unique when the only thing that differentiates them is the colour or the finish and every other specification is exactly the same?
Do you just accept the duplication penalty?
-
Doubt it'll work, but if it does, it won't in the not-so-distant future.
Page should be totally unique and those types of tactics were caught after article spinning.
-
Thanks for the responses.
This might sound silly but say I have a separate page for the red and blue items. The only difference is the colour of the fabric so the majority of the 300 words on the page will be exactly the same. How much content would I need to change for search engines not to consider the pages to be duplicates? Would changing the order of the specification bullet points help for example? Would slightly changing the words while keeping the meanings the same help (comes with 2 cushions vs comes with two cushions for example).
Thanks again.
J. -
We have a similar situation with one of our sites. Almost all our products come in multiple colors when we recently redesigned/relaunched on Magento, we did a canonical on all variations to a main parent SKU (generally the black version since it's almost never out of stock).
But we ran into the problem of Google only indexing the parent version and none of the rest, so we weren't coming up on any long tail searches. We've since changed the caonicals so every product points to itself and are hoping to get more indexed, plus we're considering ways to add more unique content to each color variation of a product.
-
Combine all the products into one product and make color a variety/option they can choose on the page.
If this is not possible, I would canonical all the products to one of the product pages.
Having the same product in several categories isn't that bad. As long as that isn't the case with the majority of products so each category is effectively the same products.
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
-
Making Shopify URL's Simpler - Losing the words 'collection', 'product' and 'page' in a Shopify store URL. Any advice?
Hi Mozers! I have a Shopify store (of which there are many advantages) however one big SEO disadvantage, is that my URL structures contravene all Moz advice on dynamic URL structure and whats more I am reminded about this every week when I have a Moz site crawl and I have a batch of URL's that are longe than the 75 characters. A Shopify URL will run www.domain name.com/collections/collection-name/product/product-name. According to advice a it should be www.domain name.com/collection-name/product-name - Don't even get started on sub-collections! I sell portfolio books, album etc and keepsake memory boxes (so long keywords) AND, I have a long(ish) business name. So, For user experience and keyword length, do I just ignore trying to achieve a dynamic URL under 75 characters? When I have asked Shopify, the say their URL's are an integral part of the "Ruby on Rails" system, so nothing can be done Or can it ??? I can't be the only Moz member with this issue can I ??
On-Page Optimization | | nick_HandCo0 -
Page grader says we are keyword stuffing but we arn't. Page source shows different story.
Hi community! We have just run a page grader for the keyword 'LED Bulbs' on whichledlight.com and it comes up that we are keyword stuffing! However, a brief look at the source for the homepage and there's only 6 times that LED Bulbs pops up. We do have the non plural version of the word 'LED Bulb' on the page 27 times.. do we think that would contribute to the keyword stuffing? Thanks!!
On-Page Optimization | | TrueluxGroup0 -
Page Speed
Google recommends a page load speed of 1.4 seconds, is it recommended to have that page speed for every page on the site, or just the landing pages. Is there a tool that will check the load speed of every page on a site and report the slow pages? The free online tools only check one page at a time.
On-Page Optimization | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Locating Duplicate Pages
Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index. Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Home Page
We are re-design our home page, one are of the current home page has a drop down window called "popular products" . We wrote short articles for our keywords and have them linked to product page. In the past, it has helped us rank. However, with new Google rules, our feeling is that such practice is no good. So, we lean towards to remove it. Still, we'd like to hear some opinions and ask some questions too: www.butterflycraze.com is it clear to you that this is not good in Google's eyes? how do I determine if these links serving any SEO purpose now after Panda? depend on the answer to 2), what should we do about these pages? shall be re-direct or shall we remove them from Google index?
On-Page Optimization | | ypl0 -
Internal Linking - Same page
Is there any benefit in internally linking back to the same page? I have no other relevant pages in the site I can link to so wondering if it's worthwhile to use anchor text to link back to the same page?
On-Page Optimization | | Will_Craig0 -
On page optimisation reports
Hello, How do I configure these reports to check my landing pages, rather than just my home page? Thanks, Bilal
On-Page Optimization | | PLP0 -
Urgent, Duplicate page title and content at eCommerce site- how to solve
Hi, there, does anyone can help to solve 'duplicate page title, duplicate page content' problem? it is a eCommerce site, each categories has hundreds of products, so there are more than 10 pages, but the report crawl the errors, i totally have no idea, can anyone help? Thanks a lot! Anna
On-Page Optimization | | anna-2944510