Duplicate Product Pages On Niche Site
-
I have a main site, and a niche site that has products for a particular category. For example, Clothing.com is the main site, formalclothing.com is the niche site.
The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated).
I have been considering shutting down the niche site, and doing a 301 to the category of the main site. Here are some more details:
-
The niche sites ranks fairly well on Yahoo and Bing. Much better than the main site for keywords relevant to that category.
-
The niche site was hit with Penguin, but doesn't seem to have been effected much by Panda.
-
When I analyze a product page on the main site using copyscape, 1-2 pages of the niche site do show, but NOT that exact product page on the niche site.
Questions:
-
Given the information above, how can I gauge the impact the duplicate content is having if any?
-
Is it a bad idea to do a canonical tag on the product pages of the niche site, citing the main site as the original source?
-
Any other considerations aside from duplicate content or Penguin issue when deciding to 301?
-
Would you 301 if this was your site?
Thanks in advance.
-
-
Haven't read anything or experimented with using canonical link elements to indicate your preferred domain. You should have server redirects in your Apache/Nginx config file for this and also set the preferred domain in GWT to really take care of that issue.
Yes, Google will certainly decide for you if you don't have other indicators on which site you want to rank for select keywords. I suppose you'll need to decide which site to keep, but if you want both then you've got a lot of work ahead of you. Ideally, you should be ranking each product page on each site for unique keywords rather than duplicating efforts and wasting resources on trying to rank the same product page on two different sites for the same keywords. Not sure why anyone would want to do that for any other reason than testing.
Anyway, my strong advice is pick a site and then merge the other site into it. If you're using Magento or WooCommerce or some other mainstream e-com platform, this should be rather easy, if not just time consuming. If they are different platforms, then I recommend Magento or a custom solution for best technical SEO features. If you can share more details about your job, I'd be glad to help.
-
Thanks for the response.
I have used the canonical tag on both sites to deal with www/non-www issues. Both sites have a single URL for each product.
The duplicate product page issue is with the content on the body of the product page. Both the same on both sites. So I have:
www.mainsite.com/product123.html and www.nichesite.com/product123.html
I checked the page title of some products in Google with quotes, only 1 product page shows up, either from the main site or the niche site. So it seems that Google is already deciding with each product page which site to show.
-
My question to you is why shut down the niche site if it's ranking better than the main site? There is surely some risk of taking a short-term hit when merging these two sites, but I'm confident in suggesting that combining the traffic from the two sites will eventually earn similar organic ranking of your niche site pages for the same keywords.
Yes, 301 redirect your pages to the new domain if possible. If you run into technical challenges with this, use MOZ to see which pages rank the highest and prioritize those redirects to the main site domain.
You stated "The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated). " I understand this to mean you found 70k products with the same/similar content on both the main site and niche site. If you simply ran a report that told you you had 70k product pages with duplicate content, I'd make sure to check your URL structure for www subdomain, trailing slashes, and the variation of both, i.e., www.domain.com/product, www.domain.com/product/, domain.com/product, domain.com/product/. These are technically all different URLs, so double check that and reply.
If you really have the same pages, obviously you'll need to fix that if combining the two sites. If you don't combine them, cross-domain canonicalization is an option (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1716747?hl=en).
-
I think a bit more would go into the consideration whether or not to 301 the site like branding, social activity, conversion rate differences, and market segments served. If everything just folds into the main site better than keeping it separate in the niche, then I'd go for it. Here's a nice case study of a company that had an issue kind of similar to yours: http://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing. Reading through that post will help with seeing things that they looked at in order consider merging the two domains. Cheers!
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 on Product Pages with Canonical Tags
Hi, I'm an SEO Intern for a third party wine delivery company and I'm trying to fix the following issue with the site regarding duplicate content on our product pages: Just to give you a picture of what I'm dealing with, the duplicate product pages that are being flagged have URLs that have different Geo-variations and Product-Key Variations. This is what Moz's Site Crawler is seeing as Duplicate content for the URL www.example.com/wines/dry-red/: www.example.com/wines/dry-red/_/N-g123456 www.example.com/wines/dry-red/_/N-g456789 www.example.com/wines/California/_/N-0 We have loads of product pages with dozens of duplicate content and I'm coming to the conclusion that its the product keys that are confusing google. So we had the web development team put the canonical tag on the pages but still they were being flagged by google. I checked the of the pages and found that all the pages that had 2 canonical tags I understand we should only have one canonical tag in the so I wanted to know if I could just easily remove the second canonical tag and will it solve the duplicate content issue we're currently having? Any suggestions? Thanks -Drew
Algorithm Updates | | drewstorys0 -
One of my pages doesn't appear in Google's search
Our page has been indexed (I just checked) but literally doesn't exist in the first 300 results despite having a respectable DA & PA. Is there something I can do? There's no reason why this specific page doesn't rank, as far as I can see. It's not a new page. Cheers, Rhys
Algorithm Updates | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Do we take a SEO hit for having multiple URLs on an infinite scroll page vs a site with many pages/URLs. If we do take a hit, quantify the hit we would suffer.
We are redesigning a preschool website which has over 100 pages. We are looking at 2 options and want to make sure we meet the best user experience and SEO. Option 1 is to condense the site into perhaps 10 pages and window shade the content. For instance, on the curriculum page there would be an overview and each age group program would open via window shade. Option 2 is to have an overview and then each age program links to its own page. Do we lose out on SEO if there are not unique URLS? Or is there a way using metatags or other programming to have the same effect?
Algorithm Updates | | jgodwin0 -
Question About : Redirecting Old Pages to New & More Relevant Ones
I'm looking over a friends website, which used to have great natural ranking for some big keywords. Those ranking & CTR's have dropped a lot, so the next thing I checked into was top selling Brand & Category pages. Its seems like every year or so a New Page was constructed for each brand... Many of which have high quality and natural inbound links. However, the pages no longer have products and simply look outdated. I'm trying to figure out if they should place redirects on all the old pages to a new URL which is more seo friendly. Example Links : http://www.xyz.com/nike2004.html , http://www.xyz.com/nike-spring2006.html , http://www.xyz.com/2011-nike-shoes.html - (have quality inbound links, bad content) .... Basically would it be advantageous to place redirects on all of these example pages to a new one that will be more permanent... http://www.xyz.com/nike-shoes.html I'm also looking at about 15 brands and maybe 100+ old/outdated urls, so I wasn't sure if I should do this & to what extent. Considering many of the brand pages do rank, but not as well as they should... Any input would help, thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Ecommerce good/bad? Showing product description on sub/category page?
Hi Mozers, I have a ecommerce furniture website, and I have been wondering for some time if showing the product descriptions on the sub/category page helps the website. If there is more content displayed on the subcategory, it should be more relevant, right? OR does it not matter, as it is duplicate content from the product page. I think showing the product descriptions on non-product pages is hurting my design/flow, but i worry that if I am to hide product content on sub/category pages my traffic will be hurt. Despite my searches I have not found an answer yet. Please take a look at my site and share your thoughts: http://www.ecustomfinishes.com/ Chris 27eVz
Algorithm Updates | | longdenc_gmail.com0 -
When Google crawls and indexes a new page does it show up immediately in Google search - "site;"?
We made changes to a site, including the addition of a new page and corresponding link/text changes to existing pages. The changes are not yet showing up in the Google index (“site:”/cache), but, approximately 24 hours after making the changes, The SERP's for this site jumped up. We obtained a new back link about a couple of weeks ago, but it is not yet showing up in OSE, Webmaster Tools, or other tools. Just wondering if you think the Google SERP changes run ahead of what they actually show us in site: or cache updates. Has Google made a significant SERP “adjustment” recently? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | richpalpine0 -
Accidently blocked our site for an evening?
Yesterday at about 5pm I switched our site to a new server and accidentally blocked our site from google for the evening. our domain is posnation.com and we are ranked in the top 3 in almost all pos related keywords. When i got in this morning i realized the mistake and went to google web tools and noticed the site was blocked so i went to fetch as google bot and corrected that. Now the message says: Check to see that your robots.txt is working as expected. (Any changes you make to the robots.txt content below will not be saved.)
Algorithm Updates | | POSNation
robots.txt file Downloaded Status
http://www.posnation.com/robots.txt 1 hours ago 200 (Success) When you go to google and type "pos systems" we are still #2 so i assume all is still ok. My question is will this potentially hurt our rankings and should i be worried and is there anything else I can do.0 -
Why would my product pages no longer be indexed in Google?
Our UK site has 72 pages in our sitemap. 30 of them are product pages which take a productid parameter. Prior to 1st Feb 2011, all pages were indexed in Google but since then all of our product pages seem to have dropped from the index? If I check in webmaster tools, I can see that we have submitted 72 pages and 42 are indexed. I realise we should have some better url structuring and I'm working on that but do you have any ideas on how we can get our product poages back into googles index http://www.ebacdirect.com
Algorithm Updates | | ebacltd0