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Let's say there's a site with products. Each page product links to a page with a form to ask for more information. Let's say that URL is like:

https://example.com/product-inquiry?product=XXX

XXX is the product code. So there are thousand of pages apparently with same 'content' (just a form, about 8 fields and a submit button).

Internally, the XXX is included in the form so I know what product the users wants info. But search engines detect this as duplicated content (because the form is the same).

How can I make clear the pages are different?

About canonical URLs

Usually, you have to provide a canonical URL in those case, to point the most important page of a group of duplicated pages. But in this case there's no point because all are equally important. Because of this, pages have a canonical URL metatag with a self-reference.

Possible solution

The only option I see is to include the product name in the title page and form header, so they are slightly different. Additionally, they may appear on search results when a user search for that product.

Is there any better approach?

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2 Answers 2

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I don't think you should worry about duplicate content in your case.

If it's duplicate, the only issue you can have is with indexing, and I don't see any reason to want to have inquiry forms indexed. These are low-value pages to users and could actually hurt your organic performance.

I'd actually recommend hiding these from search engines by editing you robots.txt file.

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  • We've decided (the dev team and SEO team) that we are going to hiding the pages from search engines using no-index. As you say, there are low-value pages that is better to remove from index, the important ones are the products and from there they can find the inquiry form.
    – sanzante
    Commented Sep 5, 2019 at 12:01
  • Just keep in mind that when using noindex, search engines are crawling all those low-value pages and may not crawl your important pages as frequently
    – Rob T
    Commented Oct 23, 2019 at 18:24
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If you have a single page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version), Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page. Google will choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that, and all other URLs will be considered duplicate URLs and crawled less often. Therefor generally Google doesn't work with forms' items names but the contents.

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