Duplicate Title - Shopping Website

[adelemaree]

My website is showing with errors due to duplicate titles, these errors add up to over 150 errors.

The problem is a lot of my products are similar, just in different lengths, colors etc.

For example
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots/48-classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots-blue.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/31-classic-candy-button-short-chocolate.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/28-classic-candy-button-short-black.html

How can I avoid this error without having to merge all my products and colors into one page?  As that would make my catalogue look too small!

Thanks in advance

[BenRWoodard]

This is one of the most common issues on an eCommerce site.  In some cases, it is just better leave it the way it is.  Obviously the best option is to optimized these pages and make them totally unique but that isn't always the right decision for you and your site.

Here is what I did.  I took a list of the best selling products the larger eCommerce site.  Then I compiled a list in a spreadsheet and worked with some other SEO's to develop a completely distinct title and description.  We ended up focusing on different aspects of the product for each variation.  Choosing more of a descriptive name than a direct name on the sub-products.

It was time consuming but it paid off.  Google was able to more clearly focus on the product.  We saw this by a clear rise in rankings for the main product page while also seeing a decrease in the variations of the product in the same SERP.  Some of that could have been credited to the changes in the algorithm.  I believe it just benefited from that position.

Hope that helps.

[MoosaHemani]

Duplicate content is the common problem when it comes to eCommerce websites and there are multiple ways to deal with it...

Once of the way is to go ahead and hire a content developer and ask him to write descriptions in such a way that it looks unique to search engine. The idea is fair but it is almost impossible when you have similar products and amount of it is around 50 plus...

The idea i will prefer is to add some space for UGC so that users can add comments and reviews about the product you are offering... as the comments will be mostly unique it will produce unique content to the overall page and that penalty will be removed.