How to provide product information without duplicate content?
-
Hi all,
I have an ecommerce website with approx 400 products, these are quite technical products and i use to have helpful information about the products on the product pages...
My SEO company told me to remove all this, as i had lots of duplicate content issues...
I have since had content writers re-write all product descriptions (about 250 words per product)... and now i am trying to figure out a way of getting the "helpful" information back on but in some kind of dynamic way...
There is basically about 5 or 6 blocks of information, that can be added to each product page, these overlap hundreds of products.
i was thinking of perhaps creating a separate static page for each block of useful information, and putting links on the product pages to this...
however, ideally i would prefer to not keep sending customers to other pages... so wanted to see if others had come across similar issues themselves and how they went about having this "content" available to the user but in such a way it was not duplicate content...
Please note using images would not be any good here, as the content varies in size but most of it is text based...
regards
James
-
Hi James,
That will probably do it. If you want to avoid having to fiddle with the paging code etc check out something like (grabbed the first link I saw) http://www.jquery4u.com/function-demos/ajax/
Loading content with ajax/jquery is pretty straightforward
-
Thanks for all the replies, seems Andy is on the right track... so i had a look around at some scripts that might perform what i need... i came across this: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/ajaxpaginate/index.htm
I could remove the paginations, and change the direct links to images, so in my limited understanding that would leave very little content for google to crawl, and there fore get rid of any duplicate content issues... does this seem correct?
please advise
-
I think Andy’s idea to use java script to pull the information is fairly a good idea but if the major problem is only the duplication of content on the product pages I would suggest you to add UGC areas on the product section and allow people to leave their comments about the product... make the UGC area crawlable to Google... when Google will come to crawl the page they will find different comments on each page which will allow the product page to stay unique as far as the content is concern!
Controlling UGC is the issue as people sometime drop shitty comments so it is better to have a moderation instead of allowing the comments to go live directly.
-
As Andy says you could pull the information into a popup/lightbox/div using javascript and source it all from the same url, so should do the trick.
Just thinking out loud now, but it might be worth testing putting the generic texts back into some of the product pages and seeing what happens. 250 word unique texts for each product might be enough to make the moz crawler (and the search engines) see enough value and difference on each page for it not to be an issue anymore. You could test in a single category for example and cross check against analytics and ranking data to see what happens.
-
As far as I am aware that is not how canonical tags are designed to be used. That use would imply that the category page itself is where the original detail is found and this is not the case for most shopping carts, which are just "lists" of products and are not product details.
This use would just confuse matters further as it is saying "don't rank this product, rank the category page because that's where this info is from" which is not what is needing to be done here.
-
You could probably consider using canonical tags for products of the same category? Get the product pages to point to the main category page. Since if they're part of the same category, the technical information will be mostly overlapping.
This way you can have all your technical information present on your page, but at the same time not be penalised for having duplicated content and making yourself searchable for the different category of products.
Hope this helps!
- Alex
-
best way i've found is to use something like facebox to draw in information from another page using javascript, google just see's it as a link to that page.
you can also do a similar thing without the pop up box, im sure someone here can remember it's name / method.
twiddles thumbs look here they come
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
-
Does having too many wordpress portfolio pages with little content hurt a site's SEO?
I have a site that is for a service company, not image based like a photographer or artist. We utilize the Portfolio feature to create a gallery of floor coating finishes (images of all the flooring finish options available) but this solution has created /portfolio/file-name pages for each image. These pages have no other content besides the image. I've run SEMrush audits on this site which shows a high percentage of pages with low text/code ratio and duplicate content (a lot of the finishes have very similar names). This site has been extremely slow to improve any visibility online (more than 9 months) and I'm wondering if this is a factor by possibly having a negative effect on our site. We initially chose the portfolio option because it was the best-looking solution for our users but we can certainly change it to another format if that is better. Thanks!
Web Design | | WillGMG0 -
Problems preventing Wordpress attachment pages from being indexed and from being seen as duplicate content.
Hi According to a Moz Crawl, it looks like the Wordpress attachment pages from all image uploads are being indexed and seen as duplicate content..or..is it the Yoast sitemap causing it? I see 2 options in SEO Yoast: Redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL. Media...Meta Robots: noindex, follow I set it to (1) initially which didn't resolve the problem. Then I set it to option (2) so that all images won't be indexed but search engines would still associate those images with their relevant posts and pages. However, I understand what both of these options (1) and (2) mean, but because I chose option 2, will that mean all of the images on the website won't stand a chance of being indexed in search engines and Google Images etc? As far as duplicate content goes, search engines can get confused and there are 2 ways for search engines
Web Design | | SEOguy1
to reach the correct page content destination. But when eg Google makes the wrong choice a portion of traffic drops off (is lost hence errors) which then leaves the searcher frustrated, and this affects the seo and ranking of the site which worsens with time. My goal here is - I would like all of the web images to be indexed by Google, and for all of the image attachment pages to not be indexed at all (Moz shows the image attachment pages as duplicates and the referring site causing this is the sitemap url which Yoast creates) ; that sitemap url has been submitted to the search engines already and I will resubmit once I can resolve the attachment pages issues.. Please can you advise. Thanks.0 -
Requirements for mobile menu design have created a duplicated menu in the text/cache view.
Hi, Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the main menu has been duplicated. Please see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.trinitypower.com&strip=1 Our coder tells me he created one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version. Duplicating the menu cannot be good for on page SEO. With that said, I have had no warnings reported back from Moz. Maybe the moz bots are not tuned to looks for such a duplication error. Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements. I did not like the look and feel of the responsive version created based on the desktop version. Hi solution to this problem is to convert the Mobile version menu into ajax. what do you guys think? Thanks, Jarrett
Web Design | | TrinityPower0 -
Fixing my sites problem with duplicate page content
My site has a problem with duplicate page content. SEO MOZ is telling me 725 pages worth. I have looked a lot into the 301 Re direct and the Rel=canonical Tag and I have a few questions: First of all, I'm not sure which on I should use in this case. I have read that the 301 Redirect is the most popular path to take. If I take this path do I need to go in and change the URL of each of these pages or does it automatically change with in the redirect when I plug in the old URL and the new one? Also, do I need to just go to each page that SEO MOZ is telling me is a duplicate and make a redirect of that page? One thing that I am very confused about is the fact that some of these duplicates listed out are actually different pages on my site. So does this just mean the URL's are too similar to each other, and there fore need the redirect to fix them? Then on the other hand I have a log in page that says it has 50 duplicates. Would this be a case in which I would use the Canonical Tag and would put it into each duplicate so that the SE knew to go to the original file? Sorry for all of the questions in this. Thank you for any responses.
Web Design | | JoshMaxAmps0 -
Using (duplicate) content in different contexts
I have three distinct hosting products, each solving three different problems. While these three products have different features in terms of functionality, they are all built on the same platform. Now, in terms of marketing some features of the platform, f.ex. High Availability, is significant to all of the products. How do I go about to include information about this feature on all product pages without getting penalized for duplicate content? Is there a way to tell Google that parts of the content on the pages for product 1-3 is duplicated with intent, or duplicated from f.ex. a page that explains the technical aspects of the platform?
Web Design | | SYSE0 -
Does having a Blog link in the top level navigation provide any better SEO value, or would having it in a footer or top navigation work just as good?
Trying to decide on whether placing a link to the blog in our top level navigation would have a better SEO value than just placing it in top or footer navigation. I have an ecommerce site.
Web Design | | RPD0 -
Does hidden content in jQuery ui tabs still get ignored?
I am looking for a more current answer to this question. I know that google leaves out the js and css. But since the code usually has display:hidden inline with the code while using jquery ui tabs I was curious to know if google considers this hidden or from what some articles have said, "tries to ignore the content". Is this still true today? I would assume no but looking for some back-up.
Web Design | | sknott0 -
Does **tag on a product description help?**
Hi, Does using the tag on a line of text in the products description help with SEO for that keyword phrase? **See here: http://www.designerboutique-online.com/tops/passarella-death-squad/passarella-death-squad-t-shirt-white/0/ I have bolded the Passarella Death Squad T-Shirt line. Would this help in any way? Cheers Will**
Web Design | | YNWA0