Duplicity Problems - What to do with similar products in e-commerce?

[BeytzNet]

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).

[CaseyKluver]

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%?

[AU-SEO]

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.

[BeytzNet]

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.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.

[BeytzNet]

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