Avoiding duplicate content on an ecommerce site

[CMoore85]

Hi all,

I have an ecommerce site which has a standard block of text on 98% of the product pages. The site also has a blog. Because these cause duplicate content and duplicate title issues respectively, how can I ever get around this? Would having the standard text on the product pages displayed as an image help? And how can I stop the blog being listed as duplicate titles without a nofollow? We already have the canonical attribute applied to some areas where this is appropriate e.g. blog and product categories.

Thanks for your help

[AaronSchinke]

Adding it as an image would help, actually. Otherwise you need to either remove the text, alter the text to be unique for each page or product, or add enough unique content to each page so that the page becomes unique enough to not be rated as duplicate content. Best practice would be to write completely unique content and get rid of the block text (or make it an image)... although this is time consuming it would be very beneficial.

Be sure that the page does have enough content on it if you remove the block text. If all that changes between product pages is just a couple words and a picture it may still be considered duplicate...

[CMoore85]

Thanks for that, I can't remove it completely or make the text bespoke to each page (as much as I'd like to!), so replacing it with an image seems the best approach. Good point about the content left on the page, I'll be sure to add more fresh, individual content to each product page. Now I just need to figure out the blog issue!

[malachiii]

I worked for 4 years on an ecommerce project focusing on the SEO aspects for that website. Obviously the goal would be to differentiate the product as much as possible.  WIth out knowing exactly what type of products you're selling its hard for us to give you an accurate list of ideas.  My recommendations would be to focus on the differentiated terms first in the product descriptions focus on color, size, etc. and avoid dupe content as much as possible.  Another possibility (although we didnt do it) would be to try nofollow on product pages and focus on the category pages for the products.  Technically this could be considered best practices, but it could have undesired effects.  may i ask what type of products you're selling and what cart software you're using?

[Cyle]

Aaron makes some really good points.  One idea on how to approach this is to look at your analytics and figure out which products are generating majority of your sales and rewrite those descriptions.  I would start with something like the top 10% of my revenue generating products and rewrite those first.

Good Luck

[CMoore85]

We're an online glasses retailer, so the set text for each product is the details of our standard lens option and extras that come as standard with each product e.g. cases and cloths. With almost 400 products I think it would be near impossible to have a different description for essentially the same feature with each pair of glasses. I actually hadn't considered focusing entirely on the categories as I felt optimizing each page individually gave us a better chance of coming up more often and higher in search.

[CMoore85]

All of our products have around 3-4 lines of individual text, as do all the categories. would you suggest that we start introducing individual text (where it is currently the same - see above) for the best selling products and see if it brings any positive change?