Duplicate Product Descriptions

[Jon-S]

Hi All,

After a bit of advice please, 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.

[VERBInteractive]

I would suggest that either you make the fabric and finishes part of the long description (making each one unique) or approach this as one product (and therefore one page) with different fabric and finish options.

If you do end up going with the similar description, could you make a main page for the product with sub-pages for the various different page for the fabrics and finishes and use the canonical tag to point at the main page.

[TimHolmes]

Hmmmmm 300+ pages all with very similar content. This would make it difficult to canonicalise to just one product of each type.

Rather than having lots of different pages with just blue chair, green chair, red chair. Could you simply not just have chair and then as an option the colour within the page.

So

Leather High Back Chair.
Price - $£200
Options - red, cream, black , tan [make a selection box/check box to choose] This way you have just one item that can be optimised be the main item.

Hope that helps.

[Jon-S]

Thanks both for the quick reply!

I have considered creating just one product with multiple variations but to have 300+ fabric variations, 4 leg style variations, 6 leg colour variations and 2 facing variations would make the UI ugly and almost impossible to use.

If I were to change the long description to also include the fabric colour would that make it unique enough? i.e 3 out of c.300 words would be different.

Thanks

[TimHolmes]

Ah so each chair can have up to 300+ fabrics available to it. That is a very customisable chair. I was expecting you to say a few colour options, a few leg options and few fabric options etc, not into the hundreds. You could make the UX/UI relatively easy to understand if presented in a nice step by step guide once a user has landed on the chairs page. e.g. Step 1: Choose your legs, Step 2: Choose your fabric , Step 3: Choose a colour.

If this is a definate no go In that case I would imagine that you would need to try and do a little more on the unique content front for each item. I know that will be a pain, but getting your H1, title and first paragraphs, product alt tags, product schema to include the product name will be imperative. If the rest of the product is similar it will be very hard to make each totally unique.

This is a great example I just found - http://www.sofasbysaxon.com/the-range/customiser/sofas/typist-chair. Even though it could do with a little refinement

[VERBInteractive]

I agree with Tim, the option selecting would make the most sense, but I can understand how 300 choices would be rather overwhelming in a drop down. Is there a way you can sub-divide the color options down?

[Jon-S]

Thanks Tim,

I have been looking at ways to do something similar and our developer guys is login to take a look at whats involved. For now it looks like I'm going to have to make the text as unique as possible.

Thanks again.

[Jon-S]

Hey,

I was thinking the exact same thing! possible I could divide the fabrics up into types to break it down a little more.

Thanks again.

[Deacyde]

What could you do if the Duplicate description was the actual wording " Product Description " ? Using BigCommerce they have it set up this way and It's rather baffling it is so.