How Do You Deal With Duplicate Content On A Retail Site

[nick_HandCo]

Hi Guys

We make custom portfolios and boxes and every time we have a Moz site crawl, Rogerbot always returns a number of Duplicate Content Issues relating to different products.

As per the image below (which I hope is visible?!) Rogerbot has flagged duplicate content onto one product that relates to 5 other different products. For instance there is duplicate content for an A4 Leather Portfolio and an A3 Leather Portfolio and an 11"x17" Leather Portfolio. I can't redirect or canonicalise to just the A4 Portfolio as they are all individually different products.

The information on each page although similar, is relevant to each of the products, so rewriting a different blurb on each product page, will not be user friendly for our customers.

I could ignore the duplicate content issues, but then that isn't good practise (and also makes for a very unsatisfactory looking Dashboard!)

Any ideas??

Nick

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[Roman-Delcarmen]

A Good option for dealing with duplicate content is to use the rel=canonical attribute. This tells search engines that a given page should be treated as though it were a copy of a specified URL, and all of the links, content metrics, and "ranking power" that search engines apply to this page should actually be credited to the specified URL.

Lets take an Iphone7 as example, you have one product with differents option 64GB, 128GB with 3 color variations, so you create a "master page" in simple words you should create some master page where you put all your seo efforts and tell the crawler ignore the other ones

[tawnycase]

Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here.

Shoot! You've already ruled out the only suggestions I have: either using the canonical tag to tell search engines (and our crawler) which version of the page has the best info on it and should rank highest, or add in some extra content on each page to differentiate them from one another.

Our tool has a 90% tolerance for duplicate content, meaning it'll flag anything that's 90% similar or more at the source code level, not just the viewable text on the page. In order to stop getting these duplicate content issues, you'll need to find some way of making each of those pages different enough from one another that they're not fighting each other for rankings anymore.

If you don't want to add a canonical tag or more text to the pages, the last option would be to just Ignore the issue in your Dashboard. If you do that, we'll stop reporting duplicate content issues for those pages going forward—we'll just ignore that class of issue for those pages. It won't fix the issue for search engines, but it would help you clean up your Moz Pro Dashboard.

I know that's not super helpful—I really wish I had some better advice to offer! Maybe one of our esteemed community members will have a suggestion for you that'll do the trick. If you want to follow up or have more questions for us, feel free to reach out to help@moz.com and we'll do our best to answer all your questions.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi There,

I work with a lot of eCommerce sites and Roman's answer is great when the problem is to have the same product in colour or size variations.

You just set up one page:

site/leather-portfolio

This is a single product in sizes A3, A4 and 11"x17. create a page with the URL as shown then have 'attributes' on the page for sizes. Typically the attribute will be held behind a # or similar so will not be indexable. The canonical would just be site/leather-portfolio and the three sizes would be in the form of a drop down or swatches on a single page. Combine all of the text you would have spread over the pages on to this one making it super smart for SEO

Also, make sure that tags are non-indexable or canonicalized otherwise those sizes may append themselves to multiple URLs causing endless duplication.

Regards Nigel

[donsilvernail]

I agree with Nigel on this. It is easier then creating different content for each variation.

[nick_HandCo]

Hi Nigel

Yet again, my thanks! A bit of a re-make, but it will be well worth it. Ironically, having sizes as attributes is something we used to do and was something that we thought we should go back to, so that's answered that question!

Thanks also for the advice re the tags.

Best Regards (and thanks again)

Nick

[nick_HandCo]

Hi Tawny

Thanks very much, as it happens Nigel has posted a response that'll hopefully solve the issue and Roman has given me food for thought on another issue we have brewing.

Best Regards

Nick