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.
John Campbell
