Coping with duplicate content in 1,000s of similar products

[guarriman3]

Hi,

I manage a website with 300,000+ products, stored in a table of a Database:
- name: name of the product (e.g. "Garden lawn mower")
- manufacturer: name of the manufacturer of the product (e.g. "Acme")
- dimensions: length x width x height (e.g. "120x40x58 cm")
- weight: (e.g. "1533 gr")

So far, I had the following structure for my title+description:
- TITLE: <name> <manufacturer> | WEBSITE_NAME
- DESCRIPTION: <name> (<manufacturer>). Access all the information. Photos, reviews.

However, most of the garden lawn mowers of my database have the same name ("Garden lawn mower") and the same manufacturer ("Acme") has dozens of "Garden lawn mower"s. Obviously, it's creating a duplicate content problem for my pages. They have different content, because the pages show different photos, different dimensions, and different reviews from users.

I'm planning a different strategy for the title+description:
- TITLE: <name> <manufacturer> <is_this_a_heavy_device>
- DESCRIPTION: <name> (<manufacturer>). Dimensions: <dimensions>. <random_sentence>

where:
- <is_this_a_heavy_device> would be "very light device" if 'weight<500gr', "light device" if <1000gr, etc.
- <random_sentence> would be a sentence chosen at random from, for example, 20 options: "Access all the information. Photos, reviews", "Want to know more? Read other users' reviews", etc. It would be random, but always the same for the same URL.

I would like to know your opinion whether this strategy would help to cope with the duplicate content problem or not. Thank you.

[edited by: phranque at 10:17 pm (utc) on May 11, 2021]
[edit reason] disable graphic smile faces [/edit]

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Since the content of the pages are different, I don't think there is a real duplicate content problem, however, it's sure that, this is not appealing, for a human, to see a list of pages, with the same title, he will not know which to choose.

So, I think the heavy device mention is a good idea, eventually, the year of release, and each model certainly has some kind of ID number , so adding it to the title might help.

[guarriman3]

Hi @JorgeV, thank you very much for your nice answer.

I don't think there is a real duplicate content problem

Yep, indeed. As a human, you notice that they are not actually the same product (different photos, different dimensions). But the rest of the text contents of the pages are the same (same title, same first paragraph containing "this is the product X", same second paragraph containing "here you are the photos", etc.).

So I'm afraid that Google might not agree with that, and that Googlebot sees the same text content.

eventually, the year of release, and each model certainly has some kind of ID number , so adding it to the title might help.

Yes, the last devices inserted the database include those data, but the first 200,000 do not :-(

Anyway, for those devices that do include ID or release year, would it be attractive for users to see an ID in the title? Could Google consider it as a 'weird' content in the title?

[lammert]

Google does not see this as duplicate content. With eCommerce sites Google knows that many products have mainly identical content on their pages, but differ in little details like size, weight, color etc. The algorithms are quite well optimized to distinguish this type of acceptable duplicate content from the type of copycat duplicate content.

To help Google further, you can consider adding GTIN codes and other unique identifiers to the pages. In that case Google will also be able to list and compare the products properly with the same products on other websites. More information about helping Google by properly tagging your products can be found in this thread [webmasterworld.com].

[guarriman3]

To help Google further, you can consider adding GTIN codes and other unique identifiers to the pages.

They are not actually commercial products, and my project is not an eCommerce site. I used the example of the commercial products to help community users to understand the situation.

They are items with generic names, some of them repeated 200s times, which forced me to create 'myweb/item/the-name-200'.

I'm planning to include more stuff into the title and into the description to avoid duplicate content, and I wondered if inserting "The name + generic group" or "The name + dimensions" could help me.

Thank you very much for your answer and my apologies for the misunderstanding.

[NickMNS]

What do you your users use to search for the products? I must assume if you have many similar items that your users are interested in the distinction between them thus they must be searching for the items based on these distinctions. What are they? Check your keyword report in GSC or Analytics, be sure to use a wide time range. Include the terms used by your users to distinguish the items.