How to provide product information without duplicate content?

[isntworkdull]

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

[SEOAndy]

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

[ReferralCandy]

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

[SEOAndy]

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.

[LynnPatchett]

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.

[MoosaHemani]

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.

[isntworkdull]

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

[LynnPatchett]

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