[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)

[EasyLounge]

Hello,

We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content.

What we have done so far:

• Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product")
• Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL)

In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do?

Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change)

Thank you in advance

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

You may have a more complex pagination issue. My former colleague wrote a good guide to this sort of e-commerce pagination / canonicalisation problem a few months ago. It may qualify as one of the non-boring reads on the subject Do you see a solution here that looks good for you? - http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

[EasyLounge]

Thank you for your answer. Great job on this guide! Actually, we already did this on our product listing pages (a combination of next/prev, noindex/follow and canonicals). It worked great.

However, our current issue is about our product pages. I'm wondering if a combination of canonicalisation and noindex on secondary content would be relevant.

[Whebb]

Hello,

If color is the main variation in the products, can you just set those as options, so each color is not a separate page? Then you just have one item and the user just selects a different color from that page. That is really the way this should be done to avoid any duplicate content issues. The other idea would just be to write different content for the pages, which if they are different products, they should already have different content already.

Hope that helps.

[EasyLounge]

Thank you for your answer. I would love to do it this way, unfortunately our current system wouldn't allow it. With more than 5000 products on our website, different content for each color variation would be time consuming.

My question was about "noindex,follow" on children products (with the proper canonicalisation) and its SEO impact. But my guess is that canonicalisation should be enough to address the issue.