E-commerce’s Biggest Headache – Duplicate Content

You might not even realize how much it’s holding back your growth. Duplicate content can act like an anchor on your sales without you even noticing it.

Having the same content on multiple pages creates significant problems. It could be identical text across several pages on your site, or that your content is the same as someone else’s. The background to this is that Google doesn’t want to show multiple pages in search results if they all seem to contain the same information.

For e-commerce sites, duplicates can appear in many different ways – some you’re probably aware of, while others are hidden beneath the surface. Let’s go through some of the most common duplicate content problems and how to handle them.

Product descriptions from suppliers

Many e-commerce businesses get their product descriptions directly from suppliers. There’s a big difference between simply publishing that text and writing your own detailed, unique descriptions. The problem is that almost all retailers who use the same supplier will end up with identical or very similar texts. How is Google supposed to know which site to display in search results?

The optimal solution is to write fully unique descriptions with rich content, helpful tips, and maybe even a proper review. Of course, this isn’t always realistic – if you have 30,000 or even 100,000 products, the cost can be overwhelming.

Some try to solve it by just rewriting a few words or copying and pasting parts of the text, but that’s rarely effective. A better approach is to build on other elements that add unique value, such as user reviews, energy consumption charts, or other content that doesn’t require as much manual work.

Another approach is to simply ignore the issue and instead focus on other aspects that can make Google choose your site despite lacking unique text. One of these aspects is site authority. Actively building links to your site can make it authoritative enough to rank, even if the product descriptions themselves don’t add much new information.

Google’s John Mueller recently stated that duplicate content isn’t necessarily a problem. What he really means is that it’s not a problem for Google – watch the video to understand why.

Categories, tag pages, search results

Any page that aggregates product information without adding unique material becomes duplicate content. For example, if a category page only contains one product, it’s basically just a weak copy of that product page in Google’s eyes, since the text and images are duplicated. Even if the exact combination of products doesn’t exist elsewhere, the content itself can be found on other pages.

Google claims you don’t need to worry too much about this, since they’ll try to sort out the right version. But we have to remember that Google’s goals aren’t always aligned with yours – they won’t necessarily choose the version of the page you want to rank.

The straightforward solution here is to add static category text, ideally paired with a unique category image. You’ve probably seen this approach on many sites. It makes the page distinct enough to stand on its own.

In many cases, you should also avoid indexing search results pages. If you let Google crawl them too aggressively, your site could get filtered out entirely. Google doesn’t like showing search results within its own search results.

A while back, Aaron made a video with more insights into this phenomenon, along with a very clear example.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ctITBoIV5b4

The same product in multiple categories or variations

Some products come in different colors or sizes, and some fit into multiple categories. If you create a separate page for each size of a T-shirt without unique text, that’s considered duplicate content. The same goes if one product exists under multiple URL paths, like /blue/car and /fast/car. Even if it makes sense to you that the car is both blue and fast, Google will likely see those pages as duplicates.

There are several ways to handle this, most of them technical. The standard SEO advice is to use a canonical tag, which is often correct – but not always. You need to ask yourself which keywords you want to rank for, and whether your site has enough authority to do so.

For example, you might want your T-shirt to rank for multiple search terms: Green T-shirt S, Green T-shirt M, Green T-shirt L, and Green T-shirt XL. In that case, you might actually need separate landing pages for each size, which means you can’t canonicalize them all to one page. You’ll need to decide based on your site’s authority and your keyword strategy. If your main goal is to rank for “Green T-shirt,” then it’s usually better to merge all the sizes into a single page and let the visitor choose their size. If that’s not possible, then use a canonical tag.

Imagine an online store that sells bananas. It’s not unreasonable to want one category for long bananas and another for yellow bananas. A “super banana” that is both long and yellow would then fit into both categories. Depending on how your platform structures URLs, this could create a duplicate content issue (the same product appearing under multiple paths).

In this example, the super banana might appear under both of these URLs:

• bananas.com/yellow/superbanana.html
• bananas.com/long/superbanana.html

If you don’t want to place all products directly under the root (bananas.com/superbanana.html) – which is a perfectly valid solution – you’ll need to choose one of two options: either assign a main category where the banana belongs, or use the canonical tag as a patch. While canonical doesn’t maximize SEO potential, it works well enough today to serve as a practical fallback. Just keep in mind that Google doesn’t always follow canonical tags and may choose to ignore them.

Here’s how to write the tag:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://bananas.com/yellow/superbanana.html”>

Main category

By forcing every product to have one main category, you can create a duplicate-free structure. When you add the super banana as a product, you choose “Yellow” as its main category. It will then only appear under /yellow/superbanana.html and not under /long/superbanana.html.

Canonical

As mentioned earlier, the canonical tag is more of a patch solution. The duplicate content problem still exists, but you’re telling search engines to only keep one version in their index. It’s not the most powerful SEO approach, but sometimes you have to make compromises. Today, canonical works well enough to be a valid option. Just remember: Google doesn’t always respect it and may choose to ignore it.

All other possible causes of duplicate content

Unfortunately, duplication issues don’t stop there. They can appear for all sorts of reasons: filter functions that Google can’t handle properly, development environments that accidentally get indexed, scrapers copying your content, different types of IDs in URLs, or pagination issues. A good starting point for finding these problems is to search for exact strings from your text in Google. That can often give you an idea of what’s happening. The next step is to dig into Google Search Console.