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
-
Content Issues: Duplicate Content
Hi there
Technical SEO | | Kingagogomarketing
Moz flagged the following content issues, the page has duplicate content and missing canonical tags.
What is the best solution to do? Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/industrial-flooring/ Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring/0 -
Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
Purchasing duplicate content
Morning all, I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well. I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | BackPack851 -
Simple duplicate content query
Hello Community, One of my clients runs a job board website. They are having some new framework installed which will lead to them having to delete all their jobs and re-add them. The same jobs will be re-posted but with a different reference number which in turn with change each URL. I believe this will cause significant duplicate content issues, I just thought I would get a second opinion on best practice for approaching a situation like this. Would a possible solution be to delete jobs gradually and 301 re-direct old URLs to new URLs? Many thanks in advance, Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
"Daily Special" = Duplicate Content?
I believe this has been addresses and answered previously, but despite searching the Q&A archives, I was unable to find the question and answer. So, please be gentle and patient: We have an eCommerce site with several hundred products, most of which use the structure: www.mysite.com/subcategory/itemA.html. We wish to feature itemA as a "daily special" item, and our Magento developer has recommended: www.mysite.com/internet-daily-special/**itemA.html ** Because itemA.html is the same page—albeit following a different path—will Google see this as duplicate content? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RScime250 -
Duplicate Content on Product Pages
Hello I'm currently working on two sites and I had some general question's about duplicate content. For the first one each page is a different location, but the wording is identical on each; ie it says Instant Remote Support for Critical Issues, Same Day Onsite Support with a 3-4 hour response time, etc. Would I get penalized for this? Another question i have is, we offer Antivirus support for providers ie Norton, AVG,Bit Defender etc. I was wondering if we will get penalized for having the same first paragraph with only changing the name of the virus provider on each page? My last question is we provide services for multiple city's and towns in various states. Will I get penalized for having the same content on each page, such as towns and producuts and services we provide? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ilyaelbert0 -
Are RSS Feeds deemed duplicate content?
If a website content management system includes built-in feeds of different categories that the client can choose from, does that endanger them of having duplicate content if their categories are the same as another client's feed? These feeds appear on templated home page designs by default. Just trying to figure out how big of an issue these feeds are in terms of duplicate content across clients' sites. Should I be concerned? Obviously, there's other content on the home page besides the feed and have not really seen negative effects, but could it be impacting results?
Technical SEO | | KyleNeuberger0 -
Duplicate Content Resolution Suggestion?
SEOmoz tools is saying there is duplicate content for: www.mydomain.com www.mydomain.com/index.html What would be the best way to resolve this "error"?
Technical SEO | | PlasticCards0