eCommerce product variants - how to avoid duplicate content?

Hello everyone!

I am currently helping to construct a new eCommerce website for an ironmongery company, and I am trying to work out how to avoid duplicate content with different product variants. For example, we sell a certain type of door closer that comes in various finishes, but apart from that the content is exactly the same. We have thought about keeping all the variants on one page, but would this affect how we rank for each variant? Basically, I am struggling to discover whether we're better off having a different page for each variant, or having it all on one page. Any help would be very much appreciated

I wouldn't worry so much about duplicate content on an eCommerce site under the same domain, even huge brands have duplicate content - think clothing stores etc. You should be fine!

Beven said:

I wouldn't worry so much about duplicate content on an eCommerce site under the same domain, even huge brands have duplicate content - think clothing stores etc. You should be fine!

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Yep totally agree, I have an ecommerce site that sells 200+ varieties of one product!
To write the descriptions we created templates for the sub varieties of the products (100% original), and spent one night creating each description with a very slight difference for each product.

And rankings are very strong

I would love a way to automate that process, if anyone has any ideas?

Thank you for your replies! Think we're going to create individual pages for each variant and try and make the content and unique as possible

Yeah don't worry about it too much. Google knows there's no way to differentiate blue sweaters from red sweaters from green sweaters. With e-commerce internal linking structure will be more important than unique content issues. I will say Penguin has really reinforced the need for 300 words of unique content on pages that rank, but there are always exceptions to the rule.

I am seeing a lot of people taking this duplicate content risk way overboard. If you copy a website word for word with
the same images in the same language and country then yes you might have a problem.

But listing several products on an eCommerce website that are similar is not a drop of water in the bucket.