Duplicate pages and slight product variations

[JM67]

Hi, I'm new here, first post...

I've started working on an existing Magento website which is selling furniture. There are products such as leather dining chairs which have very detailed product descriptions. The problem is that there is separate a page for every colour the chair comes in (with exactly the same on-page text), so the page is effectively duplicated 5 times, one for red, one for blue etc... This is made even worse by the fact that the website builder has listed the products in multiple different categories. This means that the same basic product description is in use on maybe 20 or so pages.

How would you guys deal with product descriptions for multiple, very similar products where only the colour is different? There's also the problem of very similar title tags etc...

Thanks for any help. Very much appreciated.
J.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Combine all the products into one product and make color a variety/option they can choose on the page.

If this is not possible, I would canonical all the products to one of the product pages.

Having the same product in several categories isn't that bad. As long as that isn't the case with the majority of products so each category is effectively the same products.

[Kingof5]

We have a similar situation with one of our sites. Almost all our products come in multiple colors when we recently redesigned/relaunched on Magento, we did a canonical on all variations to a main parent SKU (generally the black version since it's almost never out of stock).

But we ran into the problem of Google only indexing the parent version and none of the rest, so we weren't coming up on any long tail searches. We've since changed the caonicals so every product points to itself and are hoping to get more indexed, plus we're considering ways to add more unique content to each color variation of a product.

[JM67]

Thanks for the responses.

This might sound silly but say I have a separate page for the red and blue items. The only difference is the colour of the fabric so the majority of the 300 words on the page will be exactly the same. How much content would I need to change for search engines not to consider the pages to be duplicates? Would changing the order of the specification bullet points help for example? Would slightly changing the words while keeping the meanings the same help (comes with 2 cushions  vs comes with two cushions for example).

Thanks again.
J.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Doubt it'll work, but if it does, it won't in the not-so-distant future.

Page should be totally unique and those types of tactics were caught after article spinning.

[JM67]

Thanks. I didn't think it would work...

The question is I suppose, how do you folks make five versions of the same product description totally unique when the only thing that differentiates them is the colour or the finish and every other specification is exactly the same?

Do you just accept the duplication penalty?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

It would help, but step back and ask yourself if writing a whole new description for a "red" widget is worth it? If color makes a big difference, then by all means go for it. Most cases, you're better with just a single page to list all your options. This page on Amazon demonstrates nicely

Unfortunately, I'm not an authority on Magento, but there may be some SEO plugins you could benefit from that might add canonical tags to those product pages.

At a minimum, I'd read Yoast's guide on Magento SEO:

http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/

And you might want to check out this canonical plugin for Magento:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Yoast/extension/906/canonical-url-s-for-magento

Hope this helps!