Is My Boilerplate Product Description Causing Duplicate Content Issues?

[znagle]

I have an e-commerce store with 20,000+ one-of-a-kind products. We only have one of each product, and once a product is sold we will never restock it. So I really have no intention to have these product pages showing up in SERPs. Each product has a boilerplate description that the product's unique attributes (style, color, size) are plugged into. But a few sentences of the description are exactly the same across all products.

Google Webmaster Tools doesn't report any duplicate content. My Moz Crawl Report show 29 of these products as having duplicate content. But a Google search using the site operator and some text from the boilerplate description turns up 16,400 product pages from my site.

Could this duplicate content be hurting my SERPs for other pages on the site that I am trying to rank? As I said, I'm not concerned about ranking for these products pages. Should I make them "rel=canonical" to their respective product categories? Or use "noindex, follow" on every product? Or should I not worry about it?

[crackingmedia]

Hi Zachery

29 pages showing up in your Moz crawl report out of 16,400 indexed pages on your site is such a small percentage (0.18% to be accurate) it is not worth worrying about. Also, if GWT is not reporting any issues I think you should be fine.

Don't worry, be happy!  

Peter

[TomRayner]

Hi Zachary

I really can't be sure if it's having an adverse affect, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

Having looked at just 3 of the product pages, there is a problem with content being repeated, but I think it is being compounded by there being no other content on the page either to make it look unique.

Both are the hallmarks to a potential Panda penalty, which could affect the pages performance themselves and/or the whole domain.  So, if you're seeing subpar performance (and even if you're performing well it's worth reading on) I would look at the following solution.

For every product that you do not intend to restock or reuse, I would either add a  tag, add a 301 redirect or simply remove the page and serve a 404.  If we're talking tens of thousands, then having that many redirects might bloat out your .htaccess file (making it larger and longer to load/process) and having an instant drop of 20k URLs and 404 errors might look a bit odd to Google as well.  However, adding 20k tags is a bit of a nightmare as well.

You might want to try a combination of all 3 - a few 404 errors is nothing to worry about - but the logic is that you will be removing a number of pages that have this duplicate content on it, thus improving the quality of the domain.  For your remaining 'live' pages, I'd highly recommend taking the time to add 200+ words of unique content about the product in order to avoid this happening again.

An alternative solution would be to block the bots from accessing the /shop/ subfolder in your robots.txt file - and then setting up the shop and the currently active product listings on a different subdomain.  You'd lose the ability to use the /shop/ folder, but it would be quicker than manually adding tags or 301 redirects.

That's the method I would use if I wanted to address the issue.  However, this **may not be necessary **if your site is not performing badly.  You can check this to a degree with the Panguin Tool - this overlays your organic traffic in analytics with Google updates - if a drop in traffic coincides with a Panda penalty, you may be under the affect of one - in which case you should take action ASAP.

Hope this helps.

[znagle]

Hi Tom,

Thanks so much for the thorough response.

Based on several comparative metrics with sites that are outranking me significantly, I do feel the site is underperforming. Because our traffic is ridiculously seasonal the Panguin Tool doesn't provide any clues.

I just added to all my products using Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin. We'll see what happens.

Thanks,
Zach

[znagle]

My SERPs for a competitive term I felt I underperforming for dropped about 10 spots overnight after I added "noindex,follow" to the product pages. From the 3rd page to the 4th page, so it's not like I had a lot to lose. My SERPs for less competitive long tail keywords, which is where I'm getting most of my traffic, have dropped slightly or stayed the same.

Should I cross my fingers and hope for a recovery? Revert the product pages back to "index, follow"? Any thoughts?