How to avoid duplicate content in WordPress eCommerce Store

Question

I run a WordPress eCommerce store powered by WooCommerce. I have a large inventory of products and most of the product descriptions are the same for all products and it's mandatory to include it. It's creating a large amount of duplicate content on the site.

Each category has 6 products. I thought two solutions, can you suggest which one is the best?

1. no index and follow product page and link it to categories page using canonical tag

2. index and nofollow product page and link it to categories page using canonical tag

Which is the best solution and is it a good practice to use canonical tag to link to categories page?

Answer 1

How many total products do you have? Are you not able to write a quick ordered list of unique features for that product? I would make sure that all the content was indexed and followable. Blocking the robots is probably the last resort. You should spend the time to being writing unique descriptions. In the long run that will pay off more since all product pages will be indexed, crawled and hopefully found in search results ultimately increasing your sales. Basically do everything you can except for blocking access to these pages. I'm sure you can come up with a few words for each product to make the description unique.

Also if your products are so similar to one another are you able to create fewer products with product options?