Canonical tag on webstore products to avoid Duplicate Page Content ?

[isabelledylag]

Hi,

I would like to have an opinion on what how we are planning to solve the issue with Duplicate Page Contents that MOZ PRO is showing us.

MOZ Pro is showing us a lot of pages with duplicate content as High Priority Issue. Mainly the problem is with products which have very few differences between them, e.g. pink bike model X and red bike model X.

So we decided to implement a canonical tag on these products, and the pink bike model X will now have a canonical pointing to the red bike model X. So hopefully we will be ranking higher with our red bike model X and our pink bike model X will disapear from the index. Am I right ?

Is it a good practice, since we will loose long tails indexes? I check each canonical in the Search Console, and we have extremely few searched for "pink bike model X" most of searches are "bike model X".

Thank you in advance for your opinion.

Isabelle

[Nigel_Carr]

This is one of the biggest problems for eCommerce stores like yours. I have worked with a lot and it is almost impossible to achieve a high ranking on a product where you have colour in the URL. This is because most of the descriptive content is the same, the only difference being the colour.

What you would be better doing here is to have one page for 'bike model X' - then have a drop down for colour, i.e 'pink' bike model X and 'red' bike model X. The drop down can be done as Ajax so that the page content and URL stays the same, the only thing that happens is that the image changes between colours.Some sites have colour as an attribute which appends to the end of the URL i.e

store/bike-model-x/#pink
store/bike-model-x/#red

in both cases the canonical is just 'store/bike-model-x' with the characters after the # not read or indexed by Google.

Canonicalizing, whilst offering a sticking plaster job is not correct because if the user is looking for pink, they will be presented with the red. It's not the right experience for the user.

Also if Google deems the two items to be markedly different they could show both colours in SERPS regardless, which defeats the object.

Most eCommerce solutions allow you to set up a core product, then add variations like colour and size. You will achieve much higher results in search by doing it this way.

Other Solutions:

1. Make the page content, Meta and H1s completely different - an onerous task as you would need to do this for every product in more than one colour - not ideal

2. Set up a tag of bike model x and canonicalize both colours to that - also far from ideal.

I hope this helps.

Nigel - Carousel Projects

[isabelledylag]

Hi,

Thank you for your answer, according to me drop down is not suitable to all product categories. For clothes it is a standard but not for bikes, and it could be bad for UX. This is why we wanted to use canonical on colors for specific categories.

Isabelle

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Isabelle

I think may be look around at some existing retailers.

Halfords is one of the biggest in the UK where I am and they don't have a problem with either way.

Here they list with a colour swatch on the category page with a colour and frame size drop down on the product page.

http://www.halfords.com/cycling/bikes/mountain-bikes/carrera-vengeance-womens-mountain-bike

As long as the image changes then the UX is perfect in my honest opinion.

Good luck

NIgel

[isabelledylag]

I see your point: nicely done for UX because you see the different colors in small squares already on the category page. For now we don't have this option, I will see with our webmaster, it's quite interesting.

Isabelle