Duplicity Problems - What to do with similar products in e-commerce?
-
Hello,
I have an eCommerce website with hundreds of similar products. On some occasions, besides for their measurements they are completely identical.
The titles are kept different by using the stock reference and the meta descriptions also use their measurements.
However, I'm gettingDuplicate Page Content errors by the MOZ crawler.
This is more than understandable since the products are very similar -
WHAT SHOULD I DO???I noticed a similar situation in BlueNile (the diamond ecommerce site) - They have numerous almost identical pages, see example:
http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02424873
http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02430168
For some reason, they did on each page a canonical to it's self...
I wanted to add...
It is impossible to add different descriptive texts due to the amount of products and to the rapidness they are sold (each product is unique - similar to the diamonds in the BlueNile example).
-
Dear Cyrus,
I completely agree that there is no good and added value with the stock id and measurements for Google but I felt like I had no choice.
I didn't want to start putting canonical between the pages because every other day an item is sold and then I would need to change the canonical to a similar existing item.
Are you saying that when a page makes a canonical to himself Google does not index it? Or treats it as a non original page (a copied page) even if I don't specify from where it is copied?
Please see the following question I asked that is about this matter and got a different response: http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-there-a-reason-to-put-a-canonical-to-yourself-interesting-case
Thanks
-
First, let me explain the SEOmoz duplicate content errors. These are issued anytime the HTML of a page is 95% similar to another page (this means the entire code, not just the text). It sounds like this is what is happening in your case.
Blue Nile solves this dilemma with the canonical tag. They are basically telling the search engines to consolidate all the pages into one for ranking purposes. The downside of this is that any page that doesn't point to itself isn't going to rank.
You stated that each title and description are differentiated using the "stock reference" and "measurements." The big question is... are these important for ranking? By this I mean do your customers search Google for your products by stock number and/or measurements?
If it were me, and without knowing more about your situation, I would try to consolidate your product pages as much as possible and use the canonical tag, similar to Blue Nile, on near-duplicate pages (strictly speaking, Google states the canonical tag is only for exact duplicates, but in the real world they are more flexible)
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Thanks for the reply but I am unable to create the 40% unique content.
My case is exactly like the BlueNile sample I gave on top...
These are extremely similar products but still each is unique because of slight differences (that are important to the buyers). I have thousands of products and each product is one of a kind - when it is sold - it is removed to the "sold items" section.
There is no way (and no point since each product can be sold once) to write a description to so many products that are constantly changing.
-
Your errors can be incurred for a number of reasons. You need to ensure you have a enough unique content per page, If you only have a few words or character of text related to any particular item and only a few unique words in the Title tag you will be flagged for duplication. Expand unique text where you can and ensure only Primary Brand Keywords are in the Title tag such that each page should have a majority of unique text. If your URLs are dynamic in nature investigate opportunities to make them Human Readable and in a structured format. SEOmoz has written numerous guides on URL structure. Place unique content wherever you can in images files names, alt text etc... Think minimum of 40% content differential per page including the site template. Too many links in a navigation can impact you if you have limited body content on a page.
-
It looks like on those two examples its just the table% and depth % that are different? Any way you could just combine the similar products, and just make it a option to select the different table % and depth%?
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
-
Medical product schema
Hello guys I would need your help for the schema markup for a medical product. We have companies 'medical' pages and their own products. We need the best people (like you :p) to confirm the markup implementation we should go for. Question 1 https://aumet.azurewebsites.net/en/medical-manufacturers/Jordan/sun-plastic-medical-materials-industries-co-ltd-209415 Should we list the product with the markup medicalentity https://schema.org/MedicalEntity Should we list the products with the markup products https://schema.org/Product Should we add them as List https://schema.org/ItemList or as items owns https://schema.org/owns **Question 2 ** https://aumet.azurewebsites.net/en/medical-manufacturers/Jordan/sun-plastic-medical-materials-industries-co-ltd-209415 Why do have issue with og:property type https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool#url=https%3A%2F%2Faumet.azurewebsites.net%2Fen%2Fmedical-manufacturers%2FJordan%2Fsun-plastic-medical-materials-industries-co-ltd-209415 marked as unspecified type
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | floaumet0 -
How to rank a product page
Hello, I have a product page and just did a little introduction ( 5 lines of text) but I have the feeling this is not enough for google. What is the solution ? Is it to increase the amount of content even though it is not going to be user friendly ? Or will google look at the product page I link too and take into account the content on those subpages to boost my "pillar / product page". Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Help with duplicate pages
Hi there, I have a client who's site I am currently reviewing prior to a SEO campaign. They still work with the development team who built the site (not my company). I have discovered 311 instances of duplicate content within the crawl report. The duplicate content appears to either be 1, 2, or 3 versions of the same pages but with differing URL's. Example: http://www.sitename.com http://sitename.com http://sitename.com/index.php And other pages follow a similar or same pattern. I suppose my question is mainly what could be causing this and how can I fix it? Or, is it something that will have to be fixed by the website developers? Thanks in advance Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODarren0 -
E-commerce site blog creating bad signals?
I have an e-commerce site with quite a large (subdirectory) blog attached. The blog is very successful, having attracted about 2 million visitors last year - almost 4 times that of our actual e-commerce pages. Although all content is tangentially relevant, the blog does not convert well directly (mostly because it attracts people at the wrong point in the funnel). Our average bounce rate on e-commerce pages is around 40%, while the blog is about 90% (it answers questions directly with some outbound links); and average page visits to e-commerce pages is 4, compared to 1.3 on the blog. I am concerned that this 80% of my traffic that does not often convert and leaves the site quickly, is costing me in rankings on the pages that do perform well. We recently re-released the e-commerce section of the site and despite cleaning up our structure and content, fixing bad URL structure etc., we saw little benefit. I am therefore considering taking the blog OFF our site and moving it elsewhere, linking back to the e-commerce site and allowing it to stand on its own two feet. Is this a bad idea? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | redtalons10 -
Problems with a NoIndex NoFollow Site
For legal reasons my website is going to launch non-branded websites. We do not have the capacity to make these site sufficiently unique from the main site so we are planning on having them be NoIndex NoFollow. Are there any potential SEO problems here? What will the implication be if in ~1-2 years from launching the NoIndex NoFollow we make the site unique, take away the tag and want to start promoting these sites organically. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Issue with duplicate content in blog
I have blog where all the pages r get indexed, with rich content in it. But In blogs tag and category url are also get indexed. i have just added my blog in seomoz pro, and i have checked my Crawl Diagnostics Summary in that its showing me that some of your blog content are same. For Example: www.abcdef.com/watches/cool-watches-of-2012/ these url is already get indexed, but i have asigned some tag and catgeory fo these url also which have also get indexed with the same content. so how shall i stop search engines to do not crawl these tag and categories pages. if i have more no - follow tags in my blog does it gives negative impact to search engines, any alternate way to tell search engines to stop crawling these category and tag pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sumit600 -
Duplicate titles got me stumped
Webmaster tools is showing duplicate titles for example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/ and: http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire%20/bands-in-lincolnshire/ What's the %20 all about? I didn't create that page and it is a duplicate of the first. I'm also getting them for some pages with capitialisation? Eg: http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/ http://www.musicliveuk.com/Lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/ I have also installed buddypress on another site I work on (I use wordpress) and have since had duplicate title issues for members that have signed up: /members/admin/activity/friends/ /members/admin/activity/groups/ /members/admin/activity/just-me/ These pages are all showing duplicate titles? How can I fix this? I use all in one SEO pack and have <a title="Click for Help!">Canonical URLs checked.</a> Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
ECommerce products duplicate content issues - is rel="canonical" the answer?
Howdy, I work on a fairly large eCommerce site, shop.confetti.co.uk. Our CMS doesn't allow us to have 1 product with multiple colour and size options so we created individual product pages for each product variation. This of course means that we have duplicate content issues. The layout of the shop works like this; there is a product group page (here is our disposable camera group) and individual product pages are below. We also use a Google shopping feed. I'm sure we're being penalised as so many of the products on our site are duplicated so, my question is this - is rel="canonical" the best way to stop being penalised and how can I implement it? If not, are there any better suggestions? Also, we have targeted some long-tail keywords in some of the product descriptions so will using rel-canonical effect this or the Google shopping feed? I'd love to hear experiences from people who have been through similar things and what the outcome was in terms of ranking/ROI. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0