Do you know a case where product variations caused panda?

[lcourse]

Would like to add 300 products to ecommerce site of which 150 products are just variations in different colors.

In this particular case there are some reaons for:

• Not writing partially unique product descriptions for each product variation
• Not setting them up as variations on one product page

So I would have several product pages with nearly identical product descriptions (proprietary description written by us), just name of color in title and description and EAN in description being different, as well as over time different user generated content showing up. Also different product images used.

I would not mind if google  would not index some product variations.

Do you think I should be concerned about Panda? Do you know any website which had a Panda problem caused by product variations?

Thanks

[Travis-W]

Use excel to concatenate unique product descriptions using different parts of the sentence as different variables.

[EGOL]

As you describe your problem it seems to me that you will have lots of very near duplicate content pages on your site.  That can cause a panda problem and is a waste of your website's power.

There are multiple solutions.

1. combine all of these color,etc. variants to a single page

2. use rel=canonical to attribute duplicates to a master version

3. write very unique descriptions for each color,etc variant, optimizing each for a different query

[lcourse]

thanks.

I understand that this is considered best practice.

But do you know about a case or heard about a case where this really was the likely reason for panda?

I noticed that some very big ecommerce sites such as zalando with top-notch SEO, actually publish color variations with near-identical product descriptions and without canonical or noindex. I was wondering, maybe google is more understanding in terms of content duplciation when it comes to product variations on ecommerce sites as it is generally not done for manipulative purposes.

[MarieHaynes]

I have done a large number of traffic drop audits for Panda hit sites and I can tell you that I have seen many sites where product descriptions have gotten them in the doghouse.

In most cases, however, the main problem is that the site is using stock product descriptions that hundreds of other sites are also using.  As such Google sees that xx% of your site contains information that is exactly the same as other sites and decides that your site is of low quality and should not rank well.

In your situation though, you are talking about duplication within your own site if I understand you right.  So, you are saying that you would write a unique product description and then have slight variations on each page.

I worked with one site that sold not products, but reports.  The reports produced thousands of pages on the site that had 90-95% duplicated content and then just a few words that were unique to that page.  I believe that the Panda issue was connected to this mass duplication.

You asked why large brands can get away with this.  That is a really good question.  This is a personal theory, and not something I have proven, but I am wondering if Google has some leeway in regards to Panda for brands who sell products.  When I look at the site you mentioned their product descriptions are thin and yes, they are duplicate.  There is almost no text on the page for some of them.  These are classic things that can cause other sites to be affected by Panda.

I really think your best option is to use rel-canonical for these pages.  This type of situation is exactly why Google developed rel canonical (see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394)

[lcourse]

Marie, thanks a lot for sharing this.

I will use the canoncical then as you suggest for now.

At a later point I will have unique product descriptions written for product variations.

From your experience, do you think small variation of description text is enough, or do you think that the majority of text may need to be unique. At zalando I actually saw that they implemented minimal variations in the beginning of the meta description. Just adding sometimes 2 words or changing word order.

[MarieHaynes]

I don't think anyone really knows how much of the text needs to be unique in order to trigger Panda.

I just finished an audit for a site that had pages that had content that was completely duplicated on another site, yet the information was all in a different order than the other site.  The site was not affected by Panda.  But does that mean that simply changing up the order of text is enough to evade Panda?  One case like this is not enough to prove anything.

I think you need more than just a change in the meta description though.