Analyzing ZAPPOS.com - how do they get away with it?
-
Hi All,
The fun thing about our industry is that unlike poker - most cards are open.
While trying to learn what the big guys are doing I chose to focus on www.Zappos.com - one of the largest sports wear (especially shoes).
I looked how they categories, interlink and on their product pages.
I have a question about duplication in an age where it is SO important.
If you look in their running sneakers category you'd see that they show the same item (in different color) as two separate items - how are these pages no considered duplication?It gets even worse - If you look inside a shoe page (a product page) in the tab "About the Brand" you'd learn that all shoes from Nike (just an example) the about the brand is exactly the same. This is about 90% of the page for hundreds of Nike shoes pages - and goes the same for all other brands.
How come they are ranked so high and not penalized in the era of Panda?
Is it as always - big brands get away with anything and everything?Here are two example shoe pages:
Nike Dart 10 (a)
Nike Dart 10 (b)Thanks!
-
As I said, that is what I would recommend doing. Zappos is not, and it could easily be due to limitations with their eCommerce or fulfillment systems since each color is probably a different sku. It could just as easily be due to the ability of these pages to rank better for each color, in which case they have an advantage over most other competitors because they can get away with it, as you have noticed.
-
Thanks for the detailed answer.
If you are putting a canonical tag then why not simply have one page with a drop down for colors?
-
Hello BeytzNet,
It is not uncommon at all for ecommerce sites to have product variants like this, each with their own SKU. They are, after all, two different products. If someone ordered one color and got the other they would be upset. If someone searched Google Shopping for Gray Nike Shoes and ended up on a page for Pink Nike Shoes it would not be a good experience for them.
Yes, a better way to do this would be to have unique on-page content for each variant of this shoe, or even to have one page that allows the user to choose their color from a drop-down list (oh wait, Zappos does that too...) so the page isn't optimal, but it is unlikely that Google would see this as something worth applying a penalty for. They would more likely just decide to rank only one version. Rather than being sneaky, it is probably just a scalability problem.
With that said, I know lots of lesser-known brands and websites that have been hit hard by Panda for similar "scalability problems". The fact that big, well-known brands can get away with a lot more is something that has been going on for a long time and isn't about to change any time soon. So to answer your question "how do they get away with it" - They get away with it by being a huge, well-known brand. It sucks, but that apparently provides a better user experience for Google searchers. I don't think there is any malicious purpose to that (e.g. Adsense revenue, helping Google partner sites...), rather it has to do with the way we, as searchers, react to branding by clicking on the results we are already familiar with and buying from sites we already trust.
If I were to handle the same situation I'd probably choose a canonical version and redirect the other pages to it since writing unique copy for each color shoe wouldn't be scaleable for a site that size. Of course you would lose some ability to rank for color-specific searches, but you could minimize that by listing the colors out in title or on-page content while allowing the user to select the color from a drop-down.
-
Cody that is not accurate. Only one of the pages references ...10~2 as the canonical URL. The other ones uses <link rel="canonical" href="/nike-dart-10~1" />.
-
It's because they utilize canonicals to specify the url that should get all of the authority. Both of your examples have this:
<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[/nike-dart-10~2](view-source:http://www.zappos.com/nike-dart-10%7E2)" /><script type="<a class="attribute-value">text/javascript</a>">
-
Hi, great question and find.
I recently read an article, I think that it was from distilled, on SEO Myths. One of the Myths was about duplicate content penalties.
"has the potential to dilute link equity," but apparently google weren't imposing serious penalties,
It was an interesting little piece, but i would suggest they are using a lot of no follow links.
As an e commerce developer, product variations are a hard one to index well.
I would be interested to get a few takes on how people are doing it well.
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
-
UK company not ranking .com domain in UK
Hi, we have a slight issue with our website. We have been proactively doing SEO for the past year, but we have run into a slight issue. Our website is ranking for search terms everywhere except Our local area (UK) We have tried creating separate sections of our site targeted just at the UK In search console. As well as targeting the whole site as UK preferred and setting the hreflang tags to en-GB. Nothing seems to be working, any ideas? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODale1 -
How to Get Rid of Dates Shown In Google Search Results
When I enter "Site: URL" to check what a search how Google displays search result, a date appears at the very front. This takes away several characters, really valuable real estate. How can I stop Google from displaying these dates? There are certain Wordpress plugins like "WP Date Remover" however the seem to only apply to blog posts. Dates are appearing on results on all my Wordpress pages. Is there an internal setting in Wordpress that will allow me to remove dates for these non blogpost pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
.com or .co.uk
I have ownership over the .co.uk and the .com for my brand name and I was wondering which URL I should use. Most my sales come from within the UK, (with only a small amount from the US). Currently I'm using the .co.uk and redirecting the .com URL but should I be doing this the other way around? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
.co.uk and com: Independent sites, but owned buy us , sharing some product information
We have two sites .com and .co.uk. Both are selling sites and the .com sells in $ and .co.uk in £s.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceA
75% of the text is from the .co.uk site and used on the .com site. Each site has 6000+ pages, 4000+ contain product descriptions that are identical. We have looked at canonical and hreflang, but neither seem to fix the problem of duplication issues. We can add into the product detail master page rel alternative, but this will not fix the other potential clashes on the other pages. Can anyone advise if we can add a site wide html to each site or one that will fix this. Many thanks0 -
How to get google to categorize a website in search results?
Hello everyone and thanks in advance for your time. I have a good understanding about SEO, backlinks etc but nowhere near to professional! A good friend of mine has an online store made with opencart e commerce platform he would like to have have category view when his company name is searched on google. Does anyone has any idea how can this be achieved?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | superofelia0 -
Our website www.turbocupones.com dropped drastically in ranking today
Our website www.turbocupones.com dropped drastically in ranking today. I have no idea why this happened as we have not outsourced any SEO and sticked to google´s guidelines. Can you please check the web and give me Ideas why this happened? Our traffic dropped by 1000%. All our content is unique. I have years of experience in SEO and never had a problem like this. The rankings dropped drastically for everything. As said all SEO done is white hat. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch0 -
How to get content to index faster in Google.....pubsubhubbub?
I'm curious to know what tools others are using to get their content to index faster (other than html sitmap and pingomatic, twitter, etc) Would installing the wordpress pubsubhubbub plugin help even though it uses pingomatic? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Branching out from .com... good idea?
Lets say I want to branch out from the normal ".com" genre, can you Rank a ".ly" in google search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HCGDiet0