Avoiding duplicate content with similar products

Someone was asking about how to handle the content for hundreds of similar items:

I have hundreds of items that are very similar and there's only so much keywords I can use for each page or item to avoid duplicated content or title. Should I use no indexing for similar pages? But if I do that I will have hundreds of no indexing, will that hurt my seo ranking?

Let me start by addressing one of the biggest concerns merchants have that is not that big of a deal.

Duplicate content is not a violation of Google's policies. Google will not penalize you for duplicate content. The hardest part with duplicate content is that search engines have to decide which page to index. But they do this anyway as part of their normal algorithm.

What I'd ask is, how do YOU differentiate between them all?

There's got to be something that is different between the 100s of products. Otherwise you wouldn't have 100s of them. That differentiation is what you should write about. You could even write it in such a way as "This Product is for X1 while if you have X2 then you want Product 2".

Typically the root problem is there isn't much differentiation between the products. If the only difference between two shirts are that one is red and one is blue, then they'll never be enough to justify two separate products. In that case they should be the same product in Shopify with a variant for the red and a variant for the blue. Then the content (description) for both can be the same.

Even products that are slightly the same could be consolidated. Phone chargers pretty much do the exact same thing. The differences are usually the amount of power, connector, and types of phones they work on. That's all easily described in the variant title and product options. Maybe with a specification table if you want to list the details in an easy to read way.

If you run into problems describing how a specific product is different, that's a good sign the product could be a variant instead.

There is a fine line between similar content and having too many variants. You'll need to determine where that line is based on your products.

As for no-indexing products to avoid content duplication concerns, I don't recommend. That'll just hurt you overall.

By marking urls as no-index you're telling search engines to ignore those urls and pay attention to other urls. But what if that ignored url is the best version of the content? Well, you just threw away that page and all of its SEO benefits.

An example might help to illustrate. Say you have these product pages:

• Product A with 300 words of content and 2 backlinks
• Product B with those same 300 words of content and 13 backlinks
• Product C with 100 words of unique content and 10 backlinks

Let's pretend we know nothing else about these product pages. Google would probably "grade" Product B and C as the most valuable pages. Product A may not get as much "juice" since it has some duplicate content of B and only 2 backlinks. Yet all three would likely show up in search results in some form or fashion. (I'm using terms like "grade" and "juice" to explain a point, this isn't a thing. Please don't go looking for a better grade or use the term "link juice" 🤮).

Let's say you no-index Product A because it has only 2 backlinks. That'll remove Product A from the search index, leaving only Product B and C.

But what if Product A's backlinks were from the most popular article on CNN.com and The Atlantic? Or what if there are actually 202 backlinks for Product A that Google sees but your SEO tool only saw 2? Or what if Product A has been online for years while B and C were created last month?

Marking Product A as no-index would throw away all those benefits, leaving you with only weak Product B and C.

Remember, there is no 3rd party tool that sees everything the search engines sees. Tools like this don't have more than a surface-level insight into traffic levels. And often times they provide incorrect or conflicting data as it all depends on how they measure. I've had dozens of pages getting 10x-100x the traffic than SEO tools claim.

The only time you should use no-index are for pages you don't want public. Checkout pages. Private landing pages. Download pages.

Don't use no-index to shift search engine attention. Let their algorithm judge your page's content.