5 ways to combat product page duplication
First of all welcome back to the Just Search Labs Blog. After our summer holidays we are back with a few new authors covering a slightly wider range of subjects, to start it’s SEO to ease us back into the swing of things.
An area of websites that often have a high level of duplication are product pages, and as we know duplicating other people’s content will have a negative effect on that page’s ability to rank in the search engines.
Often SEO’s concentrate on checking that home pages, category pages and blog content is unique but often forget about product pages, in the case of ecommerce sites product pages make up the majority of the content in the site.
A problem faced by site owners is often a product comes with written technical specification or ingredients list written by the supplier / manufacturer. Re-writing content for such information is a large task and often impossible, e.g. how can you re-write an ingredients list?
However there are ways around it here are 5 options that you should consider.
- Add your own review of the product. This should be placed above the technical specifications. If you might have a large number of product break the task down into 5 products a week, it might take a few months to get all of them written. This then reduces the effect of duplication so the page is not 100% copied.
Example Blacks.co.uk – Some of the products have a mini unique description.
- Add customer reviews to the page. Many ecommerce sites to allow user to add their review of the product. This adds in unique content which is free. You can also use an external service to supply the customer reviews of the product although you can’t control what people put. A top tip if using your own system is to edit people’s reviews to get the key phrases mentioned correctly. E.g. “I bought the sat nav as..” would change to “I bought the tomtom 720 as..” don’t change it too much and you might want a disclaimer saying that reviews may be edited to conform to trademark names etc. To get the reviews rolling in use a reward system, 10 reviews get you a £1 off the next purchase on the site.
Example Play.com – Plenty of reviews even for a new product all written for free.
- Combine multiple products into one page / only allow Google to see one. It might be the case you sell shoes, your site might have the same shoe in 5 colours. If you list the product 5 times you have 4 duplicates. Combine the products and then use a colour selector on the product page for the user. An alternative to this is to have a “primary” product and the similar products are noindexed / canonical tag pointing to the primary product. This can work well but is complicated to code.
Example boros.co.uk – Duplicate product contain the noindex,nofollow tag.
- Place technical specifications off the page. Either a box that pops up using JavaScript (make the page contain the noindex tag) or a PDF that you nofollow links to and block in the robots. That way the user can get to the technical specification but the search engines can’t. This method is best used for products that might have extensive details e.g. heavy machinery / cars / houses.
Example vospers.com/NewCars/Fiat/Fiat500.aspx – ebroucher is in a PDF which is then blocked in the robots.txt
- Place technical specifications in images. By placing the duplicated text into an image search engines won’t be able to indexed the content and deem the page duplicate. This method works best when some other content is on the page see point 1 and 2.There are plenty of example free code to convert text into an image in php and asp, just remember to keep the alt text blank.
Example – Amazon – No example of this to reduce duplicate content but amazon sometimes place images in the product description.
Unfortunately when it comes to duplicate content there’s not easy way around it. To get it sorted you need either invest money in content writers or get writing yourself! Hopefully the points above will give you some good ideas to combat it.
John Campbell
