ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?

[spiralsites]

We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site.

Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category.

This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product.

So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content?

Is this the best way?

[Brian-H]

Have the products have their own urls and they can be listed in as many categories as they want. Each page is looked at on it's own merits and a collection of products will look different enough to another collection of products when arranged in categories.

i.e The category pages will look different to each other as they are made up of a % shared item names/descriptions and a % different. Several categories can list the same item which has a fixed url so that item only has one instance as has no duplicate.

The problem arises when you have categories that have a high % of similar items listed.

People fear duplicate content but it's completely natural for a shopping website to have a % of shared content.

[spiralsites]

Another option i thought of would be that the other pages I simply add a no index meta tag to so it only indexes the one url.

The reason I say this as from experience of how seomoz crawls sites and some pages which i know are not duplicate content yet i have had many pages for many sites get tagged for duplicate content simply because there isn't enough of a difference on the page.

The product pages wouldb e very much the same as really all that would be different is the breadcrumb trail and possibly some other links 95% of the pages would be the same as they are the same product.

[Brian-H]

You could but I wouldn't. Reducing the number of pages in google's index reduces the number of things that can be found. I'd only start taking pages out of google's index if there was a clear demonstration that pages were not ranking. Don't hold me to this though as if your site is poor quality you could get a penalty but I've taken over sites that rankings were crippled with duplicate content, fix it and 1-2 weeks later up on the first page where they should have been.

I don't know as I haven't seen your site. It could be that it could be better constructed so that each product colour/size etc doesn't have a different page. If that is the case you can add rel-canonical tags to show your preferred master content page.

[SteveWebb]

Short answer: using rel="canonical" to point to the default URL for each product will solve the product-related duplicate content issue.

As for the "best" way to solve this problem, I actually prefer using a robots meta tag with "noindex, follow" attributes on each duplicate product page.

Since the duplicate URLs only exist for navigational purposes, I'd prefer to keep them out of the search engine indexes altogether.

Once you have this issue squared away, be sure to read through these resources for other important eCommerce considerations:

Perfecting On-Page Optimization for Ecommerce Websites

Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization

[spiralsites]

Site is still in testing but as an example the products are for cars and the same product can fit multiple cars, hence why it may be in more than one place

[Brian-H]

So that would mean there would be no duplicate for the product and only similar for the categories.

For instance in a supermarket store candles might form part of the household category, home decor category, kitchenware category and valentines category but they each reference the same un-duplicated page www.shop.com/products/white-candles.html

You have to make the call as to whether your category content is too similar to one another and if so take action such as writing 100-200 words Prior to or after the product listings.