Hello I have an ecommerce site where many of the products are variations.

[edwardfrebow]

Hello I have an ecommerce site.  Many of the products are variations. I am using the Yoast Woo Commerce plugin. My meta descriptions for each product category might only vary for length for example.

10 foot microphone cable: Hand soldered heavy-duty 24 gauge cable braided shield, CBI nickel XLR connectors Bulk pricing - Call for your price 615-406-3255

20 foot microphone cable: Hand soldered heavy-duty 24 gauge cable braided shield, CBI nickel XLR connectors Bulk pricing - Call for your price 615-406-3255

From a Moz report I am getting tons of duplicate content issues. What can I do to correct this issue? Thank you for your help.

[Kingof5]

Moz is going by a percentage threshold - if more than a certain percent is the same, it's duplicate. Revise your meta descriptions or just accept having it marked as duplicate. Duplicate meta descriptions aren't that big of an issue.

[danatanseo]

Hi Edward,

This is a very common problem in eCommerce. Although I don't have experience with Yoast's Woo Commerce, I imagine that there are several possibilities on how to deal with this issue.

Depending on how you handle your inventory there are a few options.

If you assign specific part numbers to all the different "versions" (i.e. lengths, colors, flavors, sizes, etc), which I think is probably most often the case, I would look in Woo Commerce to see if there is a way to set up a "Parent Child" relationship between a master product page and all the various versions of a product that might be available. Usually this results in creating a "Parent" part number where the master page "lives" and then all the separate version become children of that page. When someone makes their selection, the system pulls the specific part number corresponding with their selection and puts it in their cart. Technically, the children products still have "pages," but if you use a canonical tag on the parent page, leave it off the individual children "pages" and also hide those pages from being crawled and indexed, you will have solved your problem. There are a number of ways to keep those "child" product pages from being crawled and indexed, either via robots.txt or "no crawl, noindex."

The other choice, which is also probably available in Woo Commerce, is to set up a product page (again, you would have to create an Item ID or Part number for it that won't necessarily be a real product in your inventory). Then, create options for all the different versions of the items that are then presented to visitors via a drop down menu, radio buttons, etc. Again, you can usually correspond these product "options" to specific part numbers in your database. The difference is really presentation. When you use a drop-down menu selector, your visitor will only be able to select one part number for their shopping cart at a time. They would have to revisit the page and re-select different options if they wanted the same item, for example, in different lengths. The Parent/Child solution is nice is you want to allow your visitors to order 5 10-foot cables and 6 20-foot cables all on the same page at the same time.

Every platform is a little different. I have used these solutions in both Volusion, 3Dcart and seen them in Magento. It can take some back and forth to get things laid out and functioning the way you want, but from an SEO viewpoint the work is worth it because the "hub" pages that you in effect end up creating have a lot more value to searchers than having to visit nearly identical pages for cables that are exactly the same, but differ only in lengths.

Long answer I know. But I really hope it helps!

Dana

[mosquitohawk]

As Dana said, this is a pretty typical issue in e-commerce, particularly for merchants with large numbers of SKUs that are pretty much the same thing with very slight variations.  Think about trying to sell something like light bulbs.

In the recent past we have basically reinterpreted an old-school, spammy SEO technique that actually has a pretty useful, legitimate purpose in this scenario.  Spinning text.  You can use the variables from your product to create "unique-ish" content that will likely pass a duplicate content sniff test.

For example, there are many ways to write your call to action and it could be written like the below and run through a content spinner to produce different variations--

{{Call|Call us|Call Today|Telephone us|Ring us}} for {{the best|your|our best|daily best}} price 615-406-3255

Disclaimer: I'm certainly not endorsing this as a way to fool the search engines, but sometimes trying to get enough unique content to interest the algorithms takes a little creative effort.

[edwardfrebow]

Thank you

[edwardfrebow]

Thank you. My concern was coming up with the best possible meta description and then just changing length and then cutting and pasting the description into each page. I am also figuring that once my indexed page increase with more product the varies widely this will not ba as much of a problem.

[edwardfrebow]

Thank you.