Does child products cause duplication of content?

[OriyanJ]

Excuse my newbie question, but does having 5 child products (without any description in them) for 1 father product (with global description) means duplication of content?

[lindapowers]

Excuse my newbie question, but does having 5 child products (without any description in them) for 1 father product (with global description) means duplication of content?

If you use childs you should write a unique description for each one, by default it will show the description of the parent, so that would be shown in 5 products with different links... I guess you can call that duplicate content.

If you don't need unique description, photos or stock use simple variants instead of childs.

Regards

[OriyanJ]

Let's say I have a shirt with 3 colors. They all share the same description, there's no need for me to make each color unique in its description. So you're saying I'm getting duplicate content either way. Isn't that gonna "hurt" my website with Google?

[jenkinhill]

Google is brighter than many people think, it will not be harmful.

[lindapowers]

Let's say I have a shirt with 3 colors. They all share the same description, there's no need for me to make each color unique in its description. So you're saying I'm getting duplicate content either way. Isn't that gonna "hurt" my website with Google?

What Im saying is that I don't recommend using child products in that case, you should use simple cart variant of type string for example.

Or stockable cart variants https://breakdesigns.net/extensions/stockable-custom-fields

Child products will reload in different urls with the same description etc but simple variants wont, it will be the same url and product with their variants.

Regards

[OriyanJ]

What Im saying is that I don't recommend using child products in that case

The thing is, I'm also using child products to show extra information that changes with each child product. So I really need those child products.
I've noticed there's an option for "Use canonical link of the parent" when I create a "Multi Variant" custom field, but it seems to change URL either way.

[Studio 42]

Hi,
I don't understand the problem with duplicate content.
The rule is simple, any pages can be duplicate content, so if your products description, option,meta ... are not same it's not duplicate content.
But this is same for 2 parent products or any Joomla articles...

[OriyanJ]

If I have 500 products (with global description, meta & keywords), these products don't share the same content. Each of them have 20 children, then I have a lot of duplicate content. Just wanted to know how badly Google or other search engines treat that content.

[Studio 42]

Set canonical link to parent product ID, should solve the problem.
Content is content, so google do not make any different treatment for child product

[GJC Web Design]

and as was pointed out... G ain't dumb ...  Google spend millions on their algorithm .. if it is so dumb as not to be able to deduce the difference between legitimate similar content like t-shirt sizes and spammy but not clever SEO content then I think their money was not well spent....

[OriyanJ]

I appreciate your answers, you've been very helpful and made it clear now.