Regarding rel=canonical on duplicate pages on a shopping site... some direction, please.

[DavidCiti]

Good morning, Moz community:

My name is David, and I'm currently doing internet marketing for an online retailer of marine accessories. While many product pages and descriptions are unique, there are some that have the descriptions duplicated across many products.

The advice commonly given is to leave one page as is / crawlable (probably best for one that is already ranking/indexed), and use rel=canonical on all duplicates.

Any idea for direction on this? Do you think it is necessary? It will be a massive task. (also, one of the products that we rank highest for, we have tons of duplicate descriptions.... so... that is sort of like evidence against the idea?)

Thanks!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi David

There is a resource I want to point you to:
Thin & Duplicate Content: eCommerce SEO (InFlow)

I HIGHLY recommend it - it's been a huge help to me and it's loaded with tips and resources. Canonical tags and parameter handling in search console (for Google) will be a huge help in handling duplicate URLs.

If products are truly unique, then everything about that page should be truly unique. If URLs are causing the problems with parameters, make sure you handle that with canonicals and parameter handling.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[DavidCiti]

Thank you, Patrick and Kate!