Your e-commerce site is both complex and dynamic. This is precisely why keeping up with duplicate content issues can be an ongoing challenge.
Want to find out how to go about eliminating duplicate content on e-commerce websites? Read on. I’ll dive into the main culprits of duplicate content on ecom websites, honing in on the why, the how and what to do about it.
In this article:
The insights I’ll share with you below can stave off the unintended consequences of duplicate content, boosting your site’s visibility in the SERPs and ultimately driving more sales.
Understanding Duplicate Content on Websites
An e-commerce site can inadvertently generate duplicate content issues in several ways; I will discuss those in depth later. But the first thing you should know is that there are two major types of duplicate content for any website:
- Duplicate content involving webpages within your site.
- Duplicate content involving webpages on your site and other sites.
Most e-commerce sites will deal with duplicate content within their own websites unless their webpages are largely similar to other e-commerce sites.
In most cases, there isn’t a duplicate content “penalty” from Google unless it seems like the site is being deceptive in some way by scraping other websites.
Issues with duplicate content include:
- If some of your pages resemble those found elsewhere on an e-commerce website, their chances of ranking on search engines decrease considerably.
- Duplicate content can lead to an unpleasant user and search engine experience.
- Off-site content can be scraped from your site and duplicated on another domain name entirely.
So how does Google handle duplicate content within a site? Google chooses the best page to rank and filters all others from the search results.
For example, an e-commerce site might have several URLs for “***** winter jackets” — perhaps a category page for ****’s outerwear like “jackets – winter,” another for “winter clothes – jackets – *****,” and so on.
If a site has faceted search options (like a filter menu), different pages can result in the same content.
When all of these pages look the same, only one will be chosen to rank. The others will be filtered from search results.
How should you go about handling duplicate content that’s on another website? It’s simpler than you might be thinking.
Submit a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request with the offender’s web host. Tell them that your content was stolen and that the webmaster should be mandated to comply with applicable copyright laws.
Usually, the web host will take the duplicate content down and give the webmaster an official warning. But in some cases, they may remove their account. It all depends on the host’s policies.
How To Eliminate Duplicate Content on E-commerce Websites
Duplicate content on e-commerce sites can be complicated — but it’s very common. E-commerce websites often struggle with it due to their large product inventory and dynamic nature.
Let’s look closer at the most common culprits of duplicate content on e-commerce websites.
Duplicate Content From Product Descriptions
Lots of e-commerce sites use the manufacturer’s product descriptions for efficiency. But, this has been an area of concern when it comes to duplicate content across many websites on the web.
I always recommend creating original, helpful product descriptions, as every little bit can help in the competitive search results.
In terms of ranking, Google’s John Mueller offered a little more clarity around this potential duplicate content issue in 2021.
He explained how generic manufacturer descriptions might impact a website:
From that video, here are the relevant highlights:
“With duplicate content, we have essentially two roughly different things that we look at.
On the one hand is, we check if the whole page is the same, including everything like the header, the footer, and the address of the store, and things like that—which in your cases, would not be the case.
And so that’s the basic kind of duplicate content.
The other kind is with regards to things like the description. That plays a role when we show a snippet in the Search Results. So essentially, what we try to avoid is to create Search Results pages where the snippet is exactly the same as other websites.
If someone is searching for something generic which is only in the description of that product and the snippet that we would show for your website for the manufacturer were exactly the same, then we would try to pick one of those pages and show only that one.
That’s kind of the other part of the duplicate content story … it’s a little bit simplified.
But that also means that if someone is searching for … something generic that is in the description and we can tell that they want to buy it and maybe you’re the best source or the local source of that product or you have it in stock or whatever, then we will show your pages and not the other one.
And all of that is independent of you marking up like where you took the description from. It’s essentially, we have this description, we want to show it in search and we’ll pick the best page that we can show for this description.
So from that point of view I think it’s always a good practice to have unique descriptions on your pages.
But if you have a lot of products it’s not always possible. And it’s also the case that we would not penalize a website for having duplicate descriptions in their products.”
Mueller is saying some key things here:
- You don’t get a duplicate content manual action or penalty from Google unless you’re scraping entire sites. When determining if a site is truly duplicating another site, Google looks at other elements on a page, such as the header, the footer, the address, etc., not just the product description.
- If you and another e-commerce site have mostly the same content on a page in terms of the manufacturer’s product description, Google is going to determine which page is the best. So, Google looks at other factors on the site to determine which is the best source. Are you local? Do you have it in stock? There are likely many other factors, too.
What to Do
If your product is your bread and butter, you need to sell it. And let’s face it, the manufacturer’s product descriptions aren’t usually very compelling. They read more like a smartphone user manual.
I recognize that for some sites, this would be a massive undertaking. The use of AI tools like PreWriter.ai can help. At the very least, you should focus on putting effort into your best-selling products and go from there.
Here are some tips for creating great SEO product descriptions:
- Write original text for the product. Ditch the boring manufacturer’s description and infuse it with some copywriting magic. Focus on the features and the benefits.
- Write a short and long version. Some people like to skim, and some people want more details. Having both caters to your audience’s needs.
- Use tactics to break up the text. Headings tags like H1, H2, etc., break up long walls of text and guide people through the content. You can also use bullet points to call out important features in an easy-to-read format.
- Include FAQs. Everyone has at least one question about a product before they buy. Figure out what those FAQs are by talking to key departments in your organization and doing some online sleuthing using SEO tools.
If resources are an issue, manufacturer product descriptions could suffice as an effective substitute.
Just be sure that the content on your page stands out enough from its competition, including things such as meta information and heading tags.
Please note, though, that I do not recommend this except as an extreme last-ditch effort if there is no way you can do it on your own. Keep in mind that the risk is much higher.
If you want a better chance of ranking (and conversions), put time into your product descriptions.
For more guidance on this topic, check out: How to Create an E-Commerce Webpage That Drives Organic Traffic and Conversions.
Duplicate Content From URL Issues
Let’s look at another common culprit of duplicate content on e-commerce sites: URLs. URL issues can happen for all sorts of reasons and cause duplicate content on any site.
For e-commerce sites, duplicate content often arises when:
- Shoppers sort products based on criteria, such as best-selling products or price, where the content remains largely the same but the URLs differ.
- You have products with many attributes, where each different attribute has a separate URL but the content is the same.
- Shoppers filter product attributes by differing factors, for example, size, color, brand, price range, category, etc., and those filters create new URLs with the same content.
Let’s look closer at faceted navigation issues.
Faceted Navigation Issues
Faceted navigation enables users to refine their search results by applying multiple filters based on attributes (facets) of items they’re researching or browsing through.
As any e-commerce store owner knows, customers searching online typically start by filtering results by gender and clothing type (for instance jackets), followed by size, color and brand preferences.
Each choice automatically updates the list of products displayed to more accurately reflect user needs and desires.
Under an SEO perspective, faceted navigation must be implemented carefully as its implementation may lead to issues like duplicate content creation and duplication of effort.
As soon as a user selects one variation of a product, their browser appends a filter parameter into its URL address for that product page.
Here’s an example: On HomeDepot.com, here’s what happens when you are looking at a mattress and choose a queen or a king size – two separate URLs with near-identical content:
This situation can dilute link equity among your pages and waste crawl budget on low-value URLs, which could have been spent indexing more important content.
Here’s what Google has to say about faceted navigation:
“Faceted navigation, such as filtering by color or price range, can be helpful for your visitors, but it’s often not search-friendly since it creates many combinations of URLs with duplicative content. With duplicative URLs, search engines may not crawl new or updated unique content as quickly, and/or they may not index a page accurately because indexing signals are diluted between the duplicate versions.”
In that help file, Google talks about some of the best and worst practices for faceted navigation; it’s worth a read.
What To Do
The goal is to balance providing visitors with shopping tools while ensuring the website remains friendly to search engine crawlers.
While Google has become better at understanding which URLs matter the most, there are still ways to combat URL issues, such as faceted navigation.
Implementing canonical tags is your best first defense. Canonical tags help search engines understand which version of similar or near-duplicate pages should be considered as “the” original page for indexing purposes.
The advantage here is twofold: It consolidates link signals (such as ranking power) to one preferred URL, enhancing its potential to rank better while also preventing search engines from spreading their crawl budget too thin across too many low-value-added variations.
Consider an online clothing store where you have three URLs showing essentially the same t-shirt available in black:
- ?size=M
To indicate that Google should consider all these variations as one single item, you’d add a canonical tag like this within the <head> section of each variant’s HTML code:
<link rel=”canonical” href=””/>
This tells search engines that is the master copy you prefer indexed/ranked out of all its variants listed above — thus handling potential duplicate content issues on your e-commerce platform.
Google has an extensive help file on specifying a canonical here.
E-Commerce Duplicate Content Case Study
We once had a situation with a client where they had the following problems:
- The content was duplicated in product descriptions all throughout their e-commerce store.
- There were hundreds of variations of the exact same page, all tailored to different shades of color, shape, size, etc., of certain products. (Imagine the scale of duplication involved here on that many pages — we’re talking at least 30,000 pages of content, likely more, all duplicates of each other).
- Not only that, the CMS they were on was causing trailing slash issues by way of canonical tags that were erroring out as a result. Plus, the CMS they were on was also not tailored properly to their site design, resulting in both www and non-www versions of pages.
These are the things we did in order to help alleviate the problems and enhance crawling for Google:
- We first had to write all original product descriptions.
- We had to decide exactly which pages were important above all others and make sure that they were canonicalized properly using a self-canonical, and that all other duplicated pages pointed to this proper canonical version of the loaded page.
- We had to update internal links pointing to all of these other pages, and it wasn’t as simple as a 301 redirect. We had to update all those links manually.
- The trailing slash ended up being a typo in a script. Once we fixed that, we could move forward with the www and non-www versions of these pages.
- We had to make sure that we were choosing the version of these pages that made the most sense for our client’s site, which ended up being the non-www version of that page. So then, we also had to redirect all of the www versions.
By the time we were done with all of these mental (and digital) gymnastics, we saw significant increases in organic traffic results from Google for this site.
Final Thoughts
All websites have to balance performance for search engines and their users. Knowing how to eliminate duplicate content on e-commerce websites will set you up for better performance in the search results and potentially more conversions.
Our SEO experts can help you remove duplicate content and optimize your e-commerce site for peak performance.
FAQ: How does duplicate content affect search engine rankings for e-commerce websites?
In the e-commerce world, duplicate content poses an enormous risk to your SERP rankings. Whenever big search engines like Google come across duplicate content, they have trouble determining which page should be ranked higher. This not only generates confusion, but it also results in a dilution of page authority.
Duplicate content stems from a myriad of issues, like copying manufacturer product descriptions or having identical content on different URLs.
E-commerce sites often suffer the consequences of duplicate content because of the many product listings and descriptions they have. Such consequences might be drops in rankings or penalties. Penalties are most likely in cases where search engines determine that the content was intentionally copied for ranking manipulation purposes.
The goal of any given search engine is to display relevant, unique content to provide the best possible user experience. When a search engine detects duplicate content, all versions of said content may see reduced visibility and, consequently, reduced click-through rates and lower traffic.
But that’s not all – duplicate content can also cannibalize your existing rankings, with more than one page vying for a single search query. Total potential visibility will decrease as a result.
As you might be able to imagine, tackling this duplicate content issue is essential for any ecommerce website. To do so, you’ll need to conduct in-depth content audits to uncover problems and implement canonical tags or redirect duplicate pages to a primary one.
All of this work helps to consolidate the authority and concentrate ranking power into one single URL. Creating top-quality, unique content for each product is what you need to do to boost your site’s search performance.
Among the most vital tools in managing duplicate content is canonicalization. Webmasters can use canonical tags to inform search engines which version of a page to prioritize in search results. Doing this will help to consolidate link equity and prevent loss of SEO value.
301 redirects can also be used to direct users and search engines away from duplicate pages and toward the original page. Ecom sites should keep an eye on every aspect of technical SEO and do away with duplicate content to protect and boost their search engine rankings.
You can mitigate the risks of duplicate content by implementing effective keyword management. It entails conducting in-depth keyword research, writing unique meta descriptions, and creating unique content for every single product page. All of which can enhance your SEO performance.
In addition to that, you need a heavy-duty internal linking strategy to help distribute page authority throughout your website. And consider using structured data markup to further assist search engines in understanding and indexing your content.
The success of any e-commerce website hinges on user-generated content and product reviews. Because they are fresh and unique, you can utilize both of them to reduce duplicate content. Consistently putting out interactive, sharable content, and product descriptions can help to keep duplicate content at bay. Your CMS should also be configured to guard against accidental duplication – this can be helpful in the long term.
Never underestimate the influence of SEO best practices; they are central to countering the effects of duplicate content. The main facets to keep in mind include making your site mobile-friendly, taking steps to speed up your site’s page load time, and keeping a streamlined URL structure. Accurately implementing hreflang tags is another great way to stave off multi-language-related duplicate content problems.
At every turn, it’s essential to stay up to **** on the latest SEO best practices to ensure success in your ecommerce strategy.
Step-By-Step Procedure
- Pinpoint duplicate content: Utilize SEMrush, Screaming Frog, or other tools that crawl sites and identify duplicate content.
- Do a content audit: Comb through all of the pages flagged during the previous step. The goal is to determine the extent and context of the duplication.
- Write unique product descriptions: Write or rewrite your product descriptions so that every page contains unique content that holds value for your website visitors.
- Use canonical tags: Whenever you’ve got several pages that must contain similar content, point search engines to the preferred page with canonical tags.
- Use 301 redirects: Implement 301 redirects between duplicate pages and the main page. This helps to maintain SEO equity.
- Optimize your meta tags: Make sure that all meta and descriptions for every product page are unique and properly labeled.
- Roll out structured data: Apply schema markup so search engines can understand and properly index your content.
- Leverage user-generated content: Keep content evergreen by effectively tying in customer product reviews and feedback.
- Analyze URL parameters: Inspect your URL configurations for redundancies. The goal is to have clean, search engine-friendly URLs.
- Monitor your Google Search Console metrics: Check your site’s metrics on Google Search Console now and again to locate and fix duplicate content issues.
- Inspect pagination issues: Use rel=prev/next tags to handle pagination and prevent content duplication.
- Examine language tags: If your website supports multiple languages, use hreflang tags to avoid duplicate content.
- Use Google Analytics: Determine how well your content is performing and pivot as needed based on insights from that Google Analytics data.
- Optimize your images: Use filenames and alt text for your images to steer clear of duplicate content.
- Develop a strategy for your content: Craft a solid content strategy to make it easier to produce great content on a routine basis.
- Prioritize internal linking: Use internal linking to effectively distribute page authority.
- Keep your content updated: Update your content on a regular basis to maintain its originality and search value.
- Use noindex tags strategically: Whenever a page shouldn’t be indexed, use noindex tags. This will help to mitigate the risks of duplication.
- Fine-tune your CMS settings: For the best possible results, your settings should be set to avoid accidental page duplication.
- Look at competing websites: Analyze competitors’ strategies to give your site an edge and prevent potential content issues.
- Assess your backlinks: Ensure that your backlinks aren’t pointing to duplicate content pages. Doing so will help to maintain the value of your links.
- Prepare your team: Conduct ongoing content team training, keeping the entire team abreast of the best practices surrounding duplicate content.
- Remain informed: Keep up with the most recent SEO trends and search engine guidelines.
- Do periodic evaluations: Schedule routine website evaluations to catch and resolve new duplicate content issues.
When you follow the above procedures and implement SEO best practices, you can effectively solve duplicate content issues, opening the door to better search engine rankings.
If you’ve been dealing with uncertainty around how duplicate content affects search engine rankings for e-commerce websites, we trust you’ve got a better idea now. On the whole, it negatively affects page visibility, user experience, and the overall performance of your site. But with well-informed strategies and a sustained effort, you can turn this potential pitfall into an opportunity for enhanced SEO and better rankings.
