How to avoid duplicate content while adhering to Google rules
If content is king, then Google is emperor. And that’s because the world’s biggest search engine is able to dictate what’s acceptable when ranking pages and what’s not. But before anyone starts questioning the emperor’s authority, it’s important to understand that Google’s law of the online land isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
After all, Google is the long-time leader in search engines because it is constantly looking out for all parties’ best interests – websites and website visitors alike. With its newest algorithms, the sites with the most carefully crafted content will be the ones that find themselves ranking higher than the sites that might not have put as much thought into the text that they propagated throughout their pages. For Google, the goal is to direct online traffic to sites with the best and most original content. Sounds fair enough.
In a recent article from Search Engine Watch, however, the editors there relayed frustrations that come from eCommerce companies trying to adhere to Google’s new content rule changes.
“Content issues plague many sites on the web,” the editors explained. “Ecommerce sites are particularly at risk, largely due to issues that can stem from hosting hundreds or thousands of product pages.”
But in that same article, titled “eCommerce Product Pages and How to Fix Duplicate, Thin and Too Much Content,” they also offered up valuable tips for how sites can get over their individual eCommerce content hurdles. So what did the editors recommend? Well, when it comes to duplicate copy, they basically said that fresh content is always best:
“A large degree of ecommerce resellers copy their generic product descriptions directly from the manufacturer's website,” they reported. “This is a big no-no. In the age of Panda, publishing copied or duplicated content across your site will weigh your site down in the SERPs like a battleship anchor.”
They went on to suggest that eCommerce companies must begin an uphill climb, creating new, original content in-house. And although it may be a big and potentially expensive project, the end results will be well worth it. With that said, Search Engine Watch also mentioned that if the project has to be chipped away at little by little due to budgetary issues, starting with the highest margin product pages first and working backward will be most effective in making headway.
Beyond the issue of re-using the manufacturer’s product descriptions, there is also the issue of creating original content for multiple variations of the same product that reside on different pages. In this situation, the solution comes in the form of concentrated product pages. Here, drop-down menus can allow a site to offer variations as site visitors place items in their shopping cart. Just as they would select a specific size or color, other product options can be reflected in the same manner.
Before checking duplicate content off of the must-fix list, don’t forget to 301-redirect the previously ranking URLs to the condensed page. In that regard, Google says, “If you've restructured your site, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)”
Finally, for faceted navigation searches, which are one way that filters are used to tightly narrow search results, Search Engine Watch offered up a few suggestions. First on the to-do list is blocking faceted pages via the Robots.txt file. To better understand what this entails, Search Engine Watch provided a helpful link with technical details. Secondly, the editors there recommended parameter handling via Webmaster Tools, which they further defined in another blog post. Finally, they said to add self-referential canonical tags, noting that “this may help Google distinguish original from duplicate content, but it won't address crawl budget issues.”
When dealing with faceted navigation searches, it might be necessary to reach out to an eCommerce developer or an IT staff person who understands faceted navigation – whose benefits are hard to overlook from a UI/UX perspective. To get assistance, be it from a content creation or technical standpoint, feel free to reach out to the team at NetSphere Strategies. We’d be happy to help.
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