Duplicate products - is this fix acceptable?

[ATP]

Hey Mozzers,

Questions around this have been asked time and time again. But i have a specific example I would like some advice on.

I have 2 products,

Product 1: https://goo.gl/Gzo1WC
Product 2: https://goo.gl/VbrHQJ

As you can see, the products are almost identical bar some technical specifications. The owner of the business wants them listing as 2 products, combining them into a single listing with configurable options is not an option.

As such I have simply made one a canonical of the other. Whilst not ideal this seems to be the best "SEO" fix.

Option 2: My second option is to rewrite the descriptions to they are different - not too hard on this product and a future options when i have more time, however....

I am presented with a similar problem for another product where there are 23 versions of the same product, i cannot rewrite the same info this many times. They are different sizes, ranges, capacities, resolutions and accuracies and must be listed separately but contain all the same features and basic product information. The basic info is too important not to talk about, and talking about all the technical specs would be too much and teaching the customers likely to buy them to suck eggs.

As such I have taken the 23 products and broken them down into 5 similar groups of 2 to 6 products. I have then picked 1 product from each group and written a unique description and changed all similar products in its group to match choosing 1product in each group as the canonical for all the others.

So 23 same products become 5 unique products with 18 duplicated products pointing to them as canonicals.

Any product pointing to another only differs in technical info, 95% of the page is the same.

Whilst obviously not ideal, Is this an acceptable use of canonicals?

[LoganRay]

Hi,

You are correct in your use of canonical tags in this situation. I've run into similar instances and there really aren't any other options.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Really quick, Inflow has a great resource regarding thin and duplicate content for eCommerce, I suggest taking a look.

Okay, so, my thoughts here - one thing you could do here is option 2. Since these are two different versions of 1 product (while technical aspects may be the same), they are worthy of separate descriptions if you want to have a page for each. You can also take advantage of product Schema to help distinguish these a bit more as well to search engines.

Another potential option you have is one page for a product with a drop down to show the different versions of that product. That way, you have one page that can rank for that product with a great description, a bullet point list of the different versions, and a dropdown for the user to choose their version.

I am a bit weary of your canonical tag usage here because it's going to give all of your credit to the 15kg counter. A couple things come to mind here - if the 15kg sells more than the 30kg and you get more traffic / rankings there to begin with, this shouldn't be an issue. But if your 30kg gets traffic / rankings, then I'd be super cautious as to not lose your SERP positions and sales.

Just a thought! Let me know if this helps, good luck!

[ATP]

Hi Patrick, thanks for taking a look.

I agree with your first comment regarding my example product. At the moment im just trying to clear out the duplicate content flags as there are 400 products all guilty of similar crimes. A lot of work needs to be done before i can address individual product descriptions and look to insert the schema. So whilst all the traffic is going to one version of the product at the moment, because of the duplicated content neither were ranking before, so this isn't a problem. In time i will indeed look to make them different, remove the canonical and give it unique content.

I like the idea of the "main product page containing all versions", however, wouldn't this just add another version of the product with more duplicate content? Would all the other products become canonicals of this main version that links back out to them all?

Because it listed the different models + contained all the tech specs etc woulnd't it be too different to utilise a canonical in this manner?

[ATP]

The lack of options is the biggest problem, hopefully some people have some more ideas or i guess ill stick with is

[ATP]

I should have also mentioned the linking structure within the site.

All 23 versions of the product are linked from within 1 category that contains roughly 70 products. This is why the products must be kept separate. So users can browse the different specs alongside other products with similar comparable specs in the same category.

An example can be found here:  https://goo.gl/5L4cpK (its a little unordered at the moment but will be more organised soon)

Take the 572 series, on the page above, it has 11 variations, the link currently filters the results on the page all 11 models are currently canonical'd to one version of the page. The filter also produces a category page that isn't linked on the website   (https://goo.gl/c53sBY) This page is currently no-indexed.

How is the following for a solution?

Turn the 572 series filter link into a link to the 572 category page (https://goo.gl/c53sBY)
Change this page to be indexed and make its description a detailed guide to the full 572 series listing all models, options etc as you suggest
Make all the 572 products canonical of this super descriptive all singing and dancing page