Several different pages for same product... what to do?

[markovald]

I have a customer that sells car. He has various pages for every model, something like that:
Audi A3 3 doors
Audi A3 SPB
Audi A3 Another model
Audi A3 Blablabla

The title are just little different, i'm worried about keyword cannibalization.

What do you think can i do? The customer doesn't want to have one single page for every model.

So i thought and it seems that i have 2 options:
1) Use canonical from every audi product to pass value for 1 single model
2) Use noindex for every model except one
3) Change title for every model (not useful maybe...the users are not searching much the exact model according to GKP)

[netmeg]

If the users don't search for the exact models, then it doesn't make sense to have a page for each model. Me, I'd combine them in a way that makes the most sense for the user, and then let them pick their model (or configuration) from that page. If the customer doesn't want to do it that way, then tell him he has to live with his decision and go find a customer who listens.

[markovald]

netmeg, i think that sould be another solution, i can't abandon a customer just for this detail...i see 2 solutions: the noindex and the canonical.

I'm here to ask your advice about the best solution in this case.

[dipper]

losing or refusing a customer because of this would be plain madness!

option 4) let them have a page for each model as it makes the most sense in explaining the car and the model especially if the content is unique for each page but the title is similar doesn't matter. Don't try to make them change their website or presentation of product just to suit Google. Also - so long as you are not being deceptive, or spammy then internal similar/duplicate pages are dealt with by Google anyway. You could get in a mess using #1 or #2, per ..

[support.google.com...]

"Google does not recommend blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages."

Also, "Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."

imho, build unique content for each page to make it obvious that its a different and wholly unique page to Google. Usually these big brands like to present the different models in a different way anyway, so make the wording (must) and layout (if you can) unique for each.

[tangor]

Over thinking this, your customer, too. Each product is different, if only in accouterments. Keyword "cannibalization" in this regard is a boogie man fear which should be ignored.

[netmeg]

.i see 2 solutions: the noindex and the canonical.

Depends on how many products you have and how often you add them. Stuff like this becomes a logistical nightmare - someone's gotta remember to do it (and there might be personnel or other changes)

I'm not talking about just consolidating them for Google - people are under the mistaken impression that users LIKE having to thumb through separate pages for each model. As someone who visited hundreds of websites before purchasing a new car this year, I'm here to tell you - they don't. It's NOT a good user experience.

[markovald]

It's a small website, 200 cars. And this problem is limited to 12 cars that have 3 pages with different version. The users understand what differences there are for every page, but for crawler see 3/4 pages with very similar titles...and i'm worried that the google bot can find issues to find the right page to rank.

Example, i have a category page for "Audi" with 20 cars. But i rank with a product page and not with the category page. I don't like that.

The issue is that i have 3 pages for the same car, but 1 is sold to people, and others to firms...so i think the best solution is to find the way to say to Google: please consider only THIS page, doesn't consider the others pages...i'm wrong? What you will do in my situation?

[toidi]

When people get close to buying they start looking for particular models, especially with niche cars. Let g see and index all of the pages. Sometimes the customer knows their business and their customers better than outsiders, and i say this from being on both side of the equation.