Duplicate content on product pages

[FashionLux]

Hi,

We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication.

Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, don't put duplicates on every product page, that's for sure. The #1 option you have is very good idea. You say that you are afraid of users leaving product page and not coming back. Here is my idea:

Do option #1, but also dynamically "transfer" the product to that page. So, for instance you are on a product page domain.com/product1.php, when you click on a link about information (which is lets say domain.com/information.php), add a parameter to that link based on product page url you were coming from like so - domain.com/information.php?product1.

And then add extra section on information page with product details, possibility to add to cart etc, based on parameter. This way you can exclude urls with parameters from indexing (read here) or canonicalize all parameter pages to info page. This way you won't have any duplicate issues.

Cheers

[ChrisAshton]

It's a frustrating problem to have,  huh?

Rand did do a Whiteboard Friday on this general topic a while back which is fairly relevant here. As Dmitrii mentioned, option 1 is definitely the best option since the others mean content duplication of some form.

My best suggestion on this one would be to add a very short and enticing intro (I'm talking 1 or 2 lines) about that manufacture process and if they're interested, they can follow the link to the page all about it. Just make sure this link uses target="_blank" so it opens in a new tab for them. At least this way when they close that tab, they're right back to the product page they were on.

It is a risk but far safer than duplicating that same content across a bunch of products!

So, using Rand's advice from that WBF, you can pad out the content of your products very well and very uniquely and that line or 2 of text used as a "hook" to draw them to the other page is insignificant. Duplicate content is all about a ratio so if you have 2 lines of duplication amongst 500 words of unique and valuable text, it's not likely to be an issue.

Probably not the solution you were looking for but I hope it helps!

[FashionLux]

What are your thoughts around using OnScroll() function because it seems the search engines don't crawl this function easily and therefore uploading the content in that way might be safer.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html

[ChrisAshton]

To be honest, this type of thing is definitely a weak point in my knowledge but if it were my site, I wouldn't be heading in this direction with it.

What you're essentially doing is obscuring duplicate content from search engines but presenting it to users which we know is a no-no. It may well be that search engines can't "see" that duplicate content just yet but that doesn't mean they won't in the next update.

More importantly, users aren't particularly engaged by seeing the same block of content over and over so it's kind of a waste of valuable screen real estate.

One other question to consider with this scenario: do users actually want to know about this manufacture process? This isn't a leading question. What I'm getting at is that content should always cover what the user wants to know, not what the business wants them to read about.

If this process is really just a sidenote for most users, risking content duplication to push it directly in front of them is a large and unnecessary risk.

Of course, if the process is a unique selling point that may actually persuade sales and/or build that rapport, disregard this point