How to best index the product pages of your e-commerce, when you have a lot of duplicate content

Let's see how to index your site well, so that search engines can better classify your product pages.

Let's see how to index eCommerce site to the fullest, when you might have lots of duplicate content. In the 2013, the Google search engine realized that around 30% of the indexed pages had duplicate content. From that moment in Google they started a new approach in the management of duplicate contents, in particular for ecommerce it is highly discouraged to duplicate the contents.

Let's begin to see what is meant by duplicate content. Google defieliminates duplicate content such as:

Duplicate content generally refers to blocks of content that are “significantly similar” within a site, or blocks of content present on separate sites. The reason for these duplications is often not misleading. For example, non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums able to generate normal and small pages for mobile devices;
• Items shown or linked via multiple separate URLs;
• Print only versions of Web pages;

Google says that unless the intent of your duplicate content is in any way harmful, you will not receive any penalty on indexing. In reality, duplicate content does not cause direct problems, but rather indirect ones. This means that we will have to work a little more to optimize the duplicate parts of pages.

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E-commerce stores often build their content pages from a data sheet or a product description that companies use throughout the Web.

When Google examines this content and classifies it as content "well done","manipulative" or "duplicate"Then you started off on the wrong foot. This classification will cause deeper problems that will continually affect the SEO of web pages.

Google offers two suggestions:

1. Duplicate content that is not manipulative and neither duplicate does not receive a penalty;
2. The rest of your SEO has some importance.

Essentially, Google has a duplicate management policy. Now let's see what is meant by duplicate content "good".

For example if we try to search on google for "Rancilio Silvia v5 coffee machine", we find two sites where an equal description emerges:

Both e-commerce sites are selling the same product. While the titles and meta descriptions are different, we can see that the description and images of these pages are the same.

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You will notice how this coincidence can make the classification of these product pages incredibly difficult. In fact, most SEO experts might say that duplicate content has three main search engine problems:

1. It makes it difficult for Google to know which version of a page to index.
2. Second, it confuses the metrics and strength of backlinks.
3. And thirdly, the natural result of this is that Google does not know which page to rank in the search results.

And this is a problem for most e-commerce sites, because the product page is actually the place where the shop sells and earns.

How can it be that two sites are very well positioned with what is essentially a copy-paste job?

Part of the answer is that duplicate content is not necessarily spam for Google. But the truth is that, when duplicate content is present, site owners can get in the rankings and therefore traffic losses. And these losses often stem from a primary issue: Search engines rarely show multiple versions of the same content. This means that they will choose the version of the "best" page. The result is fewer duplicates on the main page.

To summarize, you have to consider that Google tries to filter duplicate content. Thus, the need to use duplicate content in some cases poses a problem.

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The SEO suffers because most e-commerce sites lack positive signals that there is unique content or added value from their duplicate content.

The solution, therefore, is to create these positive signals. Google rewards uniqueness and added value in any form. And so the solution could be a way to make content "duplicate", unique to Google. When someone copies several portions of content to the letter, it usually means that Google will assume that the whole page is just a copy of something else. Second John Mueller di Google, in the case of duplicate content, Google "will try to help you by simply selecting one and showing it."

But this is not what we want. So, if you don't want this to happen to you, the only solution is to make the pages truly unique. You will be able to get better positions in the SERP and more traffic to your site. All you need to do is be a little more creative by reusing and recycling any content.

Take for example the following two pages, relating to products for transporting food at a constant temperature, the Poliboxes.

A normal product page, with all the attributes: some images, a short description, price, etc. This page really stands out when you compare it with a different product from the same company:

It uses the exact same format, but observing the copy, we note that it promotes more or less the same product with completely different details. This means that they have had time to set a different story for this product, in a way that allows it to stand out from the search engines. It has also been optimized for keywords, designed for e-commerce, and the SEO value is increasing. Even if more effort is needed, this approach rewards.

You have to remember with e-commerce that your goal is not just to show that your product is good, but also to show that your company is the right choice.

If you can prove that your company is recognizable and that your product is good, there's no reason for visitors not to buy from you. You will not simply be ranked on Google. You can also sell more products.

Now, you can work to solve the problem of your duplicate URLs.

The search engine also examines session IDs, tracking URLs, pages compatible with the printer or paged comments as potential areas of duplicate content on your site. And since you can't always get rid of these elements, you need to make sure that Google knows what is duplicated and what is original by rearranging your URLs.

Just to show you what I mean, look at the following URLs:

www.miosito.com/prodotto
miosito.com/prodotto
http://miosito.com/prodotto
https://www.miosito.com/prodotto
https://miosito.com/prodotto

Do you notice anything in common between the 5 URL addresses?

A developer, looking at this list, will say that it is always the same page. A search engine instead will see five pages with duplicate content. Although they are all different ways to reach your site and view the same page, a search engine will see duplicate content.

The solution is to establish a preferred domain with Google Webmaster Tools. To do this you have to choose the menu settings (top right) and select Site settings in the drop-down menu.

You can then select to view your URLs with or without "www."

This is to tell Google the priority of a particular URL, thus helping to minimize problems with duplicate content. Furthermore, you will still retain any linking authority from domains that are not preferred domains. And visitors will still end up on your favorite site.

Once this is done, you will also need to make sure that all internal links on your site maintain this consistency.

Here's how it looks on my website:

I have set up my site to appear with the "www". But for product pages, this gets a little more difficult.

Many times, the way developers create e-commerce sites makes this management intrinsically difficult. For example, you may have "shop.mysite.com" for a product page when the rest of your site is "www.mysite.com". Thus, finding a way to make product page URLs uniform, blog posts and landing pages can help prevent confusion and minimize duplicate content issues.

But there is another possibility to solve this problem. The creation of canonical URLs, with which Google is told which product page is the original page, that is the one to be considered. We can do it with the command rel = canonical, and Google will understand which page is preferred instead of an alternative page, and to do this we will use a specific HTML statement.

For example, consider two pages: url and urlB.

And we consider the url as a duplicate of the url. Then in the url section, entering the command: that there is duplicate content, and that it should apply all the SEO attributes of the url to the url.

In a nutshell, there are two pages that provide SEO attributes to a page. This way, the consolidation of your URLs puts the product pages in a format that is easier to understand for a search engine.

But there is another aspect to consider for pages with duplicate content, the search for high-value search terms.

According to ecommerce experts, defiFinishing keywords and optimizing for duplicate pages is an easy and straightforward way to boost your SEO. As a first step you need to identify which types of terms to choose. Then, build your list of terms to satisfy a variety of potential searches. Once you've created your list, you'll proceed to narrow it down, to create one definitive and more relevant to your product.

For an accurate search of the optimal keywords, I can recommend Ubersuggest, wordtracker or even the search bar of an e-commerce giant like Amazon. Optimizing these keywords will help you create unique variations of product pages that will help your SEO and increase your ranks, conversions and revenue.

If you want to improve the visibility of your site or your ecommerce, you can contact me by sending an email to info @bloginnovazione.it, or by filling out the contact form of BlogInnovazione.it

Ercole Palmeri: Innovation addicted