This Rookie needs help! Duplicate content pages dropped significantly.

[AvenueSeo]

So I am pretty new to SEO Moz.  I have an e-commerce site and recently did a website redesign.  However, not without several mistakes and issues.  That said, when SEO Moz did a crawl of my site, the results showed A LOT of Duplicate Content Pages on my site due to my having one item in many variations.  It was almost over whelming and because the number of pages was so high, I have been trying to research ways to correct it quickly.  The latest crawl from yesterday shows a drastic drop in the number of duplicate content pages and a slight increase in pages with too long page titles (which is fixable).  I am embarrassed to give the number of duplicate pages that were showing but, just know, it's been reduced to a third of the amount.

I am just wondering if I missed something and should I be happy or concerned?  Has there been a change that could have caused this?  Thanks for helping this rookie out!

[Aeronet]

If you use only one item in many variations (and want to keep your website that way), you must find ways to make each page as unique as possible.

You should look at :

• The url.
• The title.
• The meta description.
• The product name and description.
• The product image name and alt attribute.
• The breadcrumb trail.

And try to customize them to make each product page unique.

Also check if a page is reachable with differents urls, if your product is reachable by its rewritten and non rewritten url, that could cause the duplicated pages problem on your website.

(For example, www.yourwebsite.com/product.php?id=02 and www.yourwebsite.com/shiny-rewritten-product-url)

If that's the case, use rel=canonical or 301 redirect to your rewritten URLs, make a sitemap with the latest ones and your duplicate pages number should go down.

[AvenueSeo]

Thank you Aeronet.  I think most of my issues are within the description.  Example: I may have a kids recliner in 50 different fabric choices.  So the url, title, meta tag, and product name are all unique.  However, the description is practically the same for each chair.  You have given me a couple things to look into though such as the written/unwritten url.  New to me but I will look into it as well as double check some other things.

When my newly designed site was released, I was unaware that the new program would generate a URL for each page based upon my product ID and not the established URL that I assigned it.  Therefore all of my previous, 5 yr old and hard worked, URL's vanished.  I did not discover this for 25 days and had to do a 301 redirect on a large chunk of my site.  It's been quite a mess.

The number of duplicate content pages have been overwhelming, but I was just shocked to see the number suddenly drop to a 3rd of what it was yesterday.  Still not sure what has happened to cause this.

[Aeronet]

Do you need to rank on every fabric name for your product ? If not, you could just put one product page and have the fabric choice in a dropdown menu.

And for the meta description, allow me to quote SEOmoz Beginners guide to SEO : "Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines)".

[AvenueSeo]

I do not need to necessarily rank for every fabric.  There are a few such as Disney characters or sports teams that I do need to rank for.  My previous site had all the chairs on one page with a drop down and it just was not as "simple" to shop the item and it made specific tracking and "book keeping" a little more difficult.  I like to have zoomed and multiple views for each chair when possible.  I find this reduces the number of returns and customer inquiries when the customer can really see each product.

So, giving each product it's own page is for two reasons - the customer's shopping experience and for my tracking purposes.

As for the meta tags- I think your quote above is possibly one issue.  The programming on my site automatically generates the meta tag based upon my product description.

By the way, Thank you for your time and expertise.

[Aeronet]

No problem, good luck with your website

[DRSearchEngOpt]

I would strongly consider using the rel=canonical tags on your pages.  If you have 1 main product 20 variations in color and 3 different image prints as well then here is what I would do.

Find the most popular of the 20 variations in color and utilize the rel=canonical for the 19 other pages to point back to that most popular page.  Dont worry about changing copy or anything drastically for this.

Now lets assume that the three different images are a disney print chair, a LOTR print chair and a Pixar Print Chair.  You believe that people might actually be searching for these 3 products in a different way than your other 20.  You should then try to create unique content for all 3 of these pages that differ from not only the other 20 color variations but also each of the other image print chairs. To make sure it is different I would not scrape any content from the other pages and re-purpose it but rather write 3 new descriptions and pages, Header Tags, Title Tags, Alt Tags, etc...

Now a best practice would still be to utilize a rel=canonical tag on all of your pages so that tracking parameters and the such do not end up getting linked to and you end up splitting your authority among different pages in the SERP.  For a good source on rel=canonical I would look here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Hope this helps and isn't too confusing.

[AvenueSeo]

OH BOY!  You're going to have to let me read through this a time or two and get back to you!    I think I get it but I need to digest a bit of this canonical stuff that I keep avoiding.

Thank you so much.  I'll get back.