Product Variations (rel=canonical or 301) & Duplicate Product Descriptions

[Jon-S]

Hi All,

Hoping for a bit of advice here please, I’ve been tasked with building an e-commerce store and all is going well so far.

We decided to use Wordpress with Woocommerce as our shop plugin. I’ve been testing the CSV import option for uploading all our products and I’m a little concerned on two fronts: -

1. Product Variations
2. Duplicate content within the product descriptions

**Product Variations: - **

We are selling furniture that has multiple variations (see list below) and as a result it creates c.50 product variations all with their own URL’s.

Facing = Left, Right

Leg style = Round, Straight, Queen Ann

Leg colour = Black, White, Brown, Wood

Matching cushion = Yes, No

So my question is should I 301 re-direct the variation URL’s to the main product URL as from a user perspective they aren't used (we don't have images for each variation that would trigger the URL change, simply drop down options for the user to select the variation options) or should I add the rel canonical tag to each variation pointing back to the main product URL.

**Duplicate Content: - **

We will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product.  Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique.

The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc.

I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO.

My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content?  If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed.

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

[MattAntonino]

Yes, you should be implementing canonical tags back to the main product page.

Also, if your c.50 URLs are parameter based (ie. /product?color=red) than you can also deal with the indexation of those in Search Console. Google gives you the option to set the options for each parameter. (You can also deal with parameters in robots.txt but unless you have to, I would do it through Search Console instead.)

To set them, go to the Parameters page.

For more information, see Google's help page.

[Jon-S]

Thanks Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time out to reply. I will implement the canonical tag for the variation pages.

Our URL's would be parameter based so I could look at the search console solution. Quick question, if I were to de-index the variation pages would adding the canonical tag be a waste of effort/the same thing?

[MattAntonino]

Well, having the canonical can help you with other situations (people taking your content, you decide to do translations later, etc) so I would go with canonicals first as they're a more robust solution. Parameter solutions in SC only affect Google itself (not Bing, not any other search engine that comes along) as well. Canonicals would help all of them at once - so def the better choice if possible.

[Jon-S]

Thanks Matt