The duplicate content problem can harm your SEO endeavours. Particularly in eCommerce sites, the probabilities of having copied pages are enormous as the online shops post a tremendous amount of content – product descriptions, pictures, videos, user guides, etc.
Most of the duplicated pages in eCommerce mediums essentially come from product descriptions since various vendors reuse them. Consider everything you need to depict an item that numerous different retailers sell too. Also, generally, the product descriptions are given by the manufacturer. In the end, you have the same product description as your competitors, bringing about duplicate content.
An ideal approach to getting rid of your duplicate pages is investing additional exertion and composing novel item depictions. This can be very difficult if you have so many pages, yet it’s excellent.
Aside from composing unique content, there are more techniques you can apply. Inquisitive to learn what they are? Continue reading this article. In the end, you will be able to find out more ways to deal with duplicate content for a higher ranking in Trinidad and Tobago.
What Is Duplicate Content and Why You Should Avoid It?
According to Google:
“Duplicate content, by and large, refers to considerable blocks of content inside or across domains that either totally coordinates other content or are comparable.”
Anyway, not all duplicate content could harm your SEO execution. Google gives a couple of instances of non-malicious content, and they are:
• Discussion forums that can create both regular and stripped-down pages focused on mobile devices
• Store items are shown or connected through various distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages
So, now we know what precisely is duplicated content, let’s have a look at the issues it creates:
• It confuses search engines which version of the page ought to be incorporated or prohibited from their index.
• They can’t recognize which is the most acceptable content to rank when a client types an inquiry.
It is evident that if you are not doing SEO of your eCommerce pages, you miss out on an opportunity. This will prompt lower search rankings, an awful user experience, and no traffic.
Below are the practical techniques to handle the duplicated content pages of your eCommerce site.
Ecommerce Strategies to Handle Duplicate Content
1. Make Unique Pages Where Possible
To improve your product description pages.
It’s very typical to compose a similar product description as the manufacturer depicted it. It is tricky to be creative as specific features of the product remain the same. You can’t compose a novel duplicate for the product size, material, or colour.
The solution to this problem is to rewrite the descriptions without altering the main features of the product. You can incorporate a couple of keywords you need for your brand to rank. It’s a tedious procedure, but it will enhance your rankings.
Let’s see an example of the same product available on different websites with a completely different product description.
Inventive and unique copy should go inseparably with fantastic photographs that display the item in the best light. In case if you have a video that can unexpectedly better depict the product to your customers.
Social proof signs and ratings can perform as a bonus. They can provide important information to your clients by providing them with the opinion of other people who have appreciated the product and its qualities.
Read more: Eight most popular local SEO tools to boost business in Trinidad and Tobago
2. Avoid Duplicate Content Across Categories and Clean Your URLs
Most online shops are organized in product categories. What precisely happens with product classes, and how the search engines crawl them?
When you use different product categories, the CMS framework you’ve to construct your site creates a unique URL for every class. For instance, if you go to an online shop and search for a particular fiction book, you will likely follow these ways:
Home -> Books -> Fiction
Home -> Fiction -> Books
The issue comes once the unique URL is created for each path since this outcome is a copied URL. A few websites even make up to ten URLs for every item, producing more copied pages significantly. This is an issue if your competitor has better optimized its category pages and doesn’t have ten links for one product. Their site will rank better in Google.
Furthermore, Google will not crawl and index your pages because the search engine will characteries your pages as copied content. Ultimately, this will miss out on prospects, as the URLs are not optimized and will not be indexed by Google.
To fix this, you can utilize canonical tags and assign a specific field to every product that permits you to set a canonical URL.
Initially, you may believe it’s not a big deal and consider these URLs the same; however, they are all duplicate content for search engines. What you need to do is to build up a preferred domain with Google Webmaster Tools. When you set your favoured URL, Google will rank it to restrict your duplicate content issues.
Additionally, you need to ensure consistency in your internal links. This is relatively more important for eCommerce shops as they have numerous product pages and categories.
The category part is somewhat interesting. If you have shop.websitexample.com for a product page and then www.websitexample.com, there is an SEO issue. When you build up your favoured domain, this is where all your links will go to.
See also: 5 Ways for Marketing Manager in Trinidad and Tobago to Take Advantage from Proxies
3. Optimize Sitemaps, Robots.txt, and Internal Links
For google indexation, these three elements play a fundamental role. And these are not only important for eCommerce websites but all types of websites. Let’s discuss them in great detail one by one.
SITEMAPS
An eCommerce site is produced using numerous pages – the shopping basket or checkout page, the confirmation page, data, the FAQ area, product guidelines, etc. Apart from caring about user-friendly navigation, you need to ensure that the search engines will have a similar experience. For a higher ranking, you need to ensure that search engines can explore virtually your site.
A sitemap is a guide of your site’s substance and how your pages speak with the web search tools. They alert them if there should be an occurrence of any new, refreshed, or changed substance rapidly. If you’ve optimized your content pages and have a sitemap, it will aid in a quicker indexation.
If you have no idea about creating an XML sitemap, some CMS platforms provide auto-generation of it. Otherwise, on WordPress, install the Yoast SEO plugin, and it will do this for you.
ROBOTS.TXT
Another compulsory component for SEO is robots.txt. Search engines use robots, otherwise called crawlers, to look through content across the web and list it in their database. The robots.txt document is vital as this is the best approach to tell search engines what piece of your site must not be crawled or indexed.
Without this file, your site would be entirely open for search engines. And this isn’t a good SEO technique. You may have obsolete content or simple pages that are not required to be indexed. That is the reason you dismiss them from being crawled.
Ensure your robots.txt file functions accurately and does not block Google from any parts of your site that should index. Additionally, suppose you do not want some pages to get indexed by Google. In that case, you can bar them from indexation by using the robots.txt file.
INTERNAL LINKS
Internal linking plays a vital role for an eCommerce site. By providing more similar products to your clients, you strategically sell your items and increase your revenue as well. The best way to link products with one another is through product descriptions.
It is a prerequisite for your indexation. Each page you want to get indexed must be accessible through at least one link on your site. This is likewise useful for client experience as your site users, while browsing the site, will be directed to various other products.
Check this: Lead Generation Strategies for retailers in Trinidad and Tobago to Follow in 2021
Conclusion
The content, as mentioned above, has correctly explained the damage caused by duplicate pages. Content is not only visible to your customers but also to search engines. In the case of duplicate content, search engines don’t rank the same content higher. Duplicate content in terms of similar product descriptions could indeed affect your income. Similarly, your site will not rank well, ultimately resulting in low traffic and no sales.
bizibi is a full turnkey solution for an ecommerce platform purely focused to the Trinidad and Tobago market. A feature rich multivendor platform that includes delivery and payments as well as a fully powerful marketing engine that not only generates a whole portfolio of marketing material for you, but also with its integration with social media we can also deliver it to your audience.