Duplicate Content

[wearehappymedia]

Hello,

I'm managing a site which shows as having duplicate page issues (in the crawl analyser) for 3 pages. Basically the site is offering 3 different options of the same product so depending on which size you select, you are directed to the relevant page. These 3 pages are basically identical apart from a slight difference in copy regarding the size (small, medium, large)

Is this likely to be a big issue regarding SEO, and what would the moz community suggest re this?

Thank you!

[MattRoney]

It's not likely to be a huge issue, in my opinion. The problem with this sort of duplicate content is simply that the search engines won't necessarily know which page to serve in response to a user's query, so people searching for you could end up being served the wrong result (or no result from you). It ties into my all-time favorite piece of SEO advice: Don't make Google think.

Personally, I'd add a canonical link to each of those pages pointing to the one you'd prefer folks to see in the search results.

[EricaMcGillivray]

It's most likely to hurt you from a perspective of low-quality content, which a lot of retail sites get dinged with. In an ideal world, having size as option to choose and only one product page is best with information about all sizes on that page. However, Matt's canonical suggestion also works as a bandaid.

[MattRoney]

Really good point. The best thing you could do would be simply to not have a unique page for each size of the same product.

[wearehappymedia]

Thanks Matt and Erica. I think we'll have to take the band aid approach at first, but it's definitely something I'll now think about with future updates and developments