Avoiding duplicate content with national e-commerce products and localized vendors
-
Hello 'mozzers!
For our example purposes, let's say we have a national cog reseller, www.cogexample.com, focusing on B2C cog sales. The website's SEO efforts revolve around keywords with high search volumes -- no long tail keywords here!
CogExample.com sells over 35,000 different varieties of cogs online, broken into search engine friendly categories and using both HTML and Meta pagination techniques to ensure adequate deep-linking and indexing of their individual product pages.
With their recent fiscal success, CogExample.com has signed 2,500 retailers across the United States to re-sell their cogs.
CogExample.com's primary objective is B2C online sales for their highly-sought search terms, ie "green cogs". However, CogExample.com also wants their retailers to show up for local/geo search; ie "seattle green cogs".
The geo/location-based retailer's web-content will be delivered from the same database as the primary online store, and thus is very likely to cause duplicate content issues.
Questions
1. If the canonical meta tag is used to point the geo-based product to the online primary product, the geo-based product will likely be placed in the supplementary indexed. Is this correct?
2. Given the massive product database (35,000) and retailers (2,500) it is not feasible to re-write 87,500,000 pages of content to sate unique content needs. Is there any way to prevent the duplicate content penalty?
3. Google product feeds will be used to localize content and feed Google's product search. Is this "enough" to garnish sizable amounts of traffic and/or retain SERP ranks?
-
If this solution works you have a lot of potential customers.
Here is a thought... Since google is demoting sites that have lots of duplicate content if you use name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> on all of the duplicate pages then the pages that remain in the index will have a better chance of ranking.
There are also other ways to keep them out of the index.
-
I was asked the same question recently by a person selling Sunglasses, thousands of them all with straight copy + paste manufacturers descriptions.
The only solution I can come up with that is anywhere near feasible is to create unique landing pages for the main keywords. In your case a landing page for Green Cogs or his case a landing page for Prescription Sunglasses. You can hopefully develop a few pages to get ranked and hopefully turn them rankings into customers.
With that strategy I also recommended employing a Review Section which would hopefully turn those customers into reviewers, thus generating unique content on each product page.
That is my best solution to date...
-
2. Given the massive product database (35,000) and retailers (2,500) it is not feasible to re-write 87,500,000 pages of content to sate unique content needs. Is there any way to prevent the duplicate content penalty?
Everybody everywhere is asking this question. "I have twenty-five websites that sell the same product and I use the same product description, photos, captions, title tags, etc. on every one of them. Is there anyway to fool google into believing that these are unique?"
Your problem is 100 times larger.
Looking at the history..... Google has been killing "instant storefront" websites for the past several years
If you figure out a way to do this you will be able to make a lot more money selling the solution than you are going to make from your 35,000 products.
I think that is the money making opportunity.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content and canonicalization confusion
Hello, http://bit.ly/1b48Lmp and http://bit.ly/1BuJkUR pages have same content and their canonical refers to the page itself. Yet, they rank in search engines. Is it because they have been targeted to different geographical locations? If so, still the content is same. Please help me clear this confusion. Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
How to solve Parameter Issue causing Duplicate Content
Hi everyone, My site home page comes up in SERP with following url www.sitename/?referer=indiagrid My question is:- Should I disallow using robots.txt.? or 301 redirect to the home page Other issue is i have few dynamic generated URL's for a form http://www.www.sitename/career-form.php?position=SEO Executive I am using parameter "position" in URL Parameter in GWT. But still my pages are indexed that is leading to duplicate page content. Please help me out.
Technical SEO | | himanshu3019890 -
Avoiding Cannibalism and Duplication with content
Hi, For the example I will use a computers e-commerce store... I'm working on creating guides for the store -
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
How to choose a laptop
How to choose a desktop I believe that each guide will be great on its own and that it answers a specific question (meaning that someone looking for a laptop will search specifically laptop info and the same goes for desktop). This is why I didn't creating a "How to choose a computer" guide. I also want each guide to have all information and not to start sending the user to secondary pages in order to fill in missing info. However, even though there are several details that are different between the laptops and desktops, like importance of weight, screen size etc., a lot of things the checklist (like deciding on how much memory is needed, graphic card, core etc.) are the same. Please advise on how to pursue it. Should I just write two guides and make sure that the same duplicated content ideas are simply written in a different way?0 -
Duplicate Content in Wordpress.com
Hi Mozers! I have a client with a blog on wordpress.com. http://newsfromtshirts.wordpress.com/ It just had a ranking drop because of a new Panda Update, and I know it's a Dupe Content problem. There are 3900 duplicate pages, basically because there is no use of noindex or canonical tag, so archives, categories pages are totally indexed by Google. If I could install my usual SEO plugin, that would be a piece of cake, but since Wordpress.com is a closed environment I can't. How can I put a noindex into all category, archive and author peges in wordpress.com? I think this could be done by writing a nice robot.txt, but I am not sure about the syntax I shoud use to achieve that. Thank you very much, DoMiSol Rossini
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Duplicate Page Content
I've got several pages of similar products that google has listed as duplicate content. I have them all set up with rel="prev" and rel="next tags telling google that they are part of a group but they've still got them listed as duplicates. Is there something else I should do for these pages or is that just a short falling of googles webmaster tools? One of the pages: http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/walnut-countertop-9.html
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
How to Solve Duplicate Page Content Issue?
I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tools for my website. I have found 89 duplicate content issue from report. Please, look in to Duplicate Page Content Issue. I am quite confuse to resolve this issue. Can any one suggest me best solution to resolve it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | | RiseSEO0