Canonical questions

[davidmaxwell]

Hi,

We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories)

So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this;

Product 1 (landing page)

• Audi (model selection page)
  ---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
  ---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
  ---Audi A3 (Model detail page)
• BMW (model selection page)
  ---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
  ---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page)

Product 2 (landing page)

• Audi (model selection page)
  ---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
  ---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
  ---Audi A3 (Model detail page)
• BMW (model selection page)
  etc
  etc

The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns.

As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content?

Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks!

[BenDuncombe]

Hi David,

You might find this will help you. https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

Other than that, someone else may be able to answer your question in more detail if that helps.

[davidmaxwell]

That does help, not sure how I missed that. Thanks Benjamin.

[BenDuncombe]

You welcome! Enjoy the rest of your day.

[_nitman]

Hi David,

If header and other details are different on these pages, why would you like to set canonical or somehow block these pages from indexing? That should be a candidate for duplicate content penalty I believe.

Could you please share some sample URLs to help me understand the issue you're talking about? I'll try my best to guide to handling this neatly from SEO perspective.

[davidmaxwell]

Thanks Nitin,

The site is in development so unfortunately I can't share a URL but I found a link that is not a million miles away from what we are doing, see below. My concern was because the bulk of the content on each page will be the same. Each page will be structure something like this:

Page Title
Car model detail (lets say Audi A4)

Generic product information for 4 product types:
Product 1
Product 2
etc

Something like this:
http://www.carscovers.co.uk/AUDI-A4-ALLROAD-CAR-COVER-2008-ONWARDS.html
http://www.carscovers.co.uk/BMW-1-SERIES-COUPE-CABRIOLET-CAR-COVER-2004-ONWARDS.html

As you will see, the main content on each of the pages above is the same. (because the actual product is the same).

Does this help describe the potential issue?

[_nitman]

Hi David,

Thanks for sharing a couple of instances to help me understand the point here. Well, I don't think there is any need of blocking these pages from indexing. You're confused about it just because you don't have much content to show on these pages and the templates is similar and hence, google might consider them as duplicate pages, right?

To resolve this issue and also, to make these pages stronger from organic visibility perspective, you would need to add on-page content and other "cool" features to make them powerful anyways. But, blocking them for bots won't be a good solution I believe.

Btw, if sharing the URLs of the pages is not possible as its in development phase, could you please share the screenshots of the pages here? Would be able to comment on how this should be handled once after having a look at it.

[davidmaxwell]

Thanks for that,

It could be an issue creating 'unique' content on every page as potentially there will be A LOT of pages (one for each major car make & model) but you might be right. I'll have a think and a chat with the dev team.

Thanks again.

[_nitman]

No problem. Do share screenshots of product pages and the URLs (once available) here. Will be able to help you out with this. Fixing is using canonical or meta robots is not a time taking solution to implement in general and hence, can be fixed at the last moment (before going live) as well. So, this can be parked for now.