The content (product offerings, customer guides) you create can make or break your e-commerce business. High-quality quantity content can significantly boost your rankings, bring more traffic to your site, and give you a leg up on the competition.

However, the very nature of e-commerce—with its large product catalogs, multiple sales channels, and syndicated content—can also lead to a common problem: duplicate content.

Duplicate content can dilute your SEO efforts, confuse search engines, and hurt your visibility. Addressing this challenge requires a proactive approach and smart tools to ensure your content stands out without competing against itself.

Want to know how? Let’s get started.

What Is Duplicate Content In SEO?

Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content that appear on multiple pages on your website or across different websites. This can include product descriptions, blog posts, category pages, service pages, and other types of content.

In the context of SEO, duplicate content issues pose a challenge because search engines will have difficulty determining which version of the content is the original or most relevant to include in their search results.

More often than not, this can result in:

• Search engines indexing and ranking multiple versions of the same content, diluting the authority and visibility of your pages
• Google applies duplicate content penalties, which can negatively impact your overall search rankings
• Confusing and frustrating users who encounter the same information across different pages

SEO duplicate content can occur for a variety of reasons on ecommerce sites, such as:

• Identical product descriptions across multiple pages or channels
• Syndicated content from manufacturers or other third-party sources
• Automatically generated pages (e.g. pagination, filters, sorting)
• User-generated content (e.g. customer reviews) appearing on multiple product pages

We can summarize this into two main types of duplicate content:

1. Internal duplicate content - This occurs when similar content exists on multiple pages within the same website. For e-commerce, this often happens with product pages that feature similar descriptions or when filter and sorting options create new URLs that serve the same content.

2. External duplicate content – This involves content that’s duplicated across different websites. It’s common when product descriptions are copied directly from manufacturers, or when content is syndicated across multiple sites without unique modifications.

Identifying and resolving these issues is an important part of maintaining a healthy, search-optimized ecommerce website.

So, let’s find out exactly how to deal with it in the next section.

How To Avoid Duplicate Content

Here are some ecommerce SEO solutions to handle duplicate content issues on an e-commerce site:

#1. Use Canonical Tags

When search engines crawl your site and find multiple pages with very similar or identical content, they face a dilemma. Which version should they index and rank?

This uncertainty can lead to search engines distributing ranking signals across duplicate pages, diluting the overall authority and visibility of your content.

The canonical tag looks like this in the HTML header:

https://example.com/preferred-page.html" />By including a canonical tag on each duplicate or very similar page, you're telling search engines: "This version may be similar to others, but this is the one you should consider the primary, authoritative source."

#2. Redirect Visitors

As we discussed, having multiple pages with the same or highly similar content can create confusion for both users and search engines. Search engines may have trouble determining which version to index and rank, potentially diluting the visibility and authority of your content.

A 301 redirect is an HTTP status code that permanently redirects users (and search engines) from one URL to another.

When you set up a 301 redirect from a duplicate page to the canonical, primary version, you're telling search engines: "This duplicate content is no longer relevant - please index and rank the content at this other URL instead."

#3. Remove Duplicate Pages

If you have pages on your site that serve no unique purpose and are essentially duplicates, the simplest solution is to remove them entirely rather than redirect them.

#4. Create Unique Content

Relying too heavily on manufacturer-provided product descriptions is a common pitfall for ecommerce sites that can lead to duplicate content problems. Instead, invest the time and resources to create custom, unique content for your product pages, category pages, blog posts, and other site content.

#5. Rewrite Descriptions

In cases where you do need to use some manufacturer-supplied product details, be proactive about significantly rewriting and rephrasing the content to make it unique.

#6. Leverage Cookies

Another technique is to use cookies to display unique content to users based on their browsing history or other factors. This allows you to dynamically generate content variations that prevent the same information from appearing across multiple pages, even if the underlying product data is the same.

#7. Optimize Site Structure

Ensuring your site has a clean, intuitive URL structure, navigation, and internal linking can minimize the potential for duplicate content issues. Things like overly complex URL parameters, poorly designed faceted navigation, and messy internal linking can all contribute to the proliferation of duplicate pages.

How To Find And Fix Duplicate Content

Finding e-commerce duplicate content on your site can be challenging, but Google Search Console provides a free starting point for identifying potential issues.

However, given the complexity and potential impact of duplicate content on your SEO performance, I strongly recommend finding an experienced SEO freelancer on Legiit to help you thoroughly identify and fix these issues.

A Legiit freelancer is particularly valuable if:

• Your site has a large product catalog
• You're using multiple sales channels
• You rely heavily on manufacturer descriptions
• You've experienced recent ranking drops
• You're planning site structure changes

What do you think about this can help you the most?