Solving duplicate content issues on e-commerce websites
Page level indexation has been facing a number of challenges from the olden days of the internet. Content level duplicate content is one of the most dreaded problems to websites although duplicates off the website pose a new breed of challenges to website owners. This article focuses on how to deal with page, sentence level duplicates to boost site search performance.
Duplicate content doesn’t necessarily mean that replicated content. Those different pages don’t have to be mirror images of each other in order to be considered duplicates. If content is not very different, in the eyes of Google, the content does not add anything new or value. In the end, this content is not indexed at all.
The biggest risk for not being indexed at page level is mainly large sites and ecommerce sites which have a lot of duplicate content or associated risks. Therefore, if your website has page level indexation issues, its best to consider dealing with duplicates at page level. This is to ensure that the search engines, at least index your websites at page level.
If you want to deal with duplicates on your website, here are a few points to ponder.
Lead with the point of difference especially when crafting Meta titles and Meta descriptions. For example, state ’20 mm brass screw’ rather than ‘exterior 20 mm screw’ to emphasize to the search engines that the pages are indeed different.
Removing boiler plated content for example that which is in the footer of all the website pages needs to go. Repeating this all through the website is massive duplicate content. Instead, come up with different unique pieces for each page like materials, our quality materials to make the difference.
Canonize the product page to drive authority to it. The best way to go about this is determining what product pages are similar and then settling on those which can be combined or accessed from a single spot to redirect. If you implement the relative canonical badly, the results could be catastrophic for your website. Therefore, you need to determine how best you can do it using tutorials at popular SEO sites like SEOMOZ.
Handwrite original content
The other great way to deal with duplicate content on a website is writing original content in the first place. Dedicate yourself to writing bespoke content that is original at sentence level. PlagSpotter is one of the most effective tools you can use to deal with duplicate content on your ecommerce website. In the case of similar products on the website, simply jot down a sentence or two that’s totally unique about the product, probably in bulleted formats below the photo.
This approach may not be practical say if you have thousands of products on the website. This means that you have to fuse the different techniques until you achieve uniqueness, at least from all your products.
Overall, duplicate content is shouldn’t be seen as a problem no matter how large your website is. Considering it’s the only block to your e-commerce business, consider investing time in making sure content is unique and worthy of indexing.
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