What to do about similar product pages on major retail site
-
Hi all,
I have a dilemma and I'm hoping the community can guide me in the right direction. We're working with a major retailer on launching a local deals section of their website (what I'll call the "local site"). The company has 55 million products for one brand, and 37 million for another.
The main site (I'll call it the ".com version") is fairly well SEO'd with flat architecture, clean URLs, microdata, canonical tag, good product descriptions, etc.
If you were looking for a refrigerator, you would use the faceted navigation and go from department > category > sub-category > product detail page.
The local site's purpose is to "localize" all of the store inventory and have weekly offers and pricing specials. We will use a similar architecture as .com, except it will be under a /local/city-state/... sub-folder.
Ideally, if you're looking for a refrigerator in San Antonio, Texas, then the local page should prove to be more relevant than the .com generic refrigerator pages. (the local pages have the addresses of all local stores in the footer and use the location microdata as well - the difference will be the prices.)
MY QUESTION IS THIS:
If we pull the exact same product pages/descriptions from the .com database for use in the local site, are we creating a duplicate content problem that will hurt the rest of the site?
I don't think I can canonicalize to the .com generic product page - I actually want those local pages to show up at the top. Obviously, we don't want to copy product descriptions across root domains, but how is it handled across the SAME root domain?
Ideally, it would be great if we had a listing from both the .com and the /local pages in the SERPs.
What do you all think?
Ryan
-
Hi Ryan,
I guess the first point here is that Google doesn't treat this sort of filtering as "penalisation"; it's just filtering two or more versions of the same content because it believes (sometimes mistakenly) that users don't need to see two versions of the same thing. This gets REALLY tricky in fields like real estate when all the aggregators in the same town have access to pretty much the same feeds or properties.
If Google were perfect, you'd put up the two pieces of identical content for all 55 millions products, and Google would serve the right one given the appropriate query, like the example above ("fridge sale san antonio" brings up the local page; "refrigerator" has your main site rank). And this might happen, because Google is getting better at these sort of query-appropriate results. We still recommend not providing dupe content solely because we can't be sure that Google will get it right.
As an aside, it would be so great if they worked on a tool for localisation in the same way that they have given us the href lang tag for internationalisation. rel="city" or similar would be awesome, especially for big countries.
Your idea about serving the content from a shared source will certainly work (iframe, text hosted on separate URL, JS etc.). The pages serving this text clearly won't be credited with that text's content, which removes its SEO value of course.
-
Hi Jane, thanks for the response!
I can't understand why Google or any other search engine would penalize a brand for having the same product detail in more than one location on the same root domain. It's just not feasible to re-write all of the product descriptions for 55 million products. The only difference is going to be the price, and some localized content on the page in terms of store locations and addresses (perhaps multiple in one area).
What if - kind of like your M&S example - the local product pages pulled product descriptions from another location on the site, but displayed them in a modal window - so a JS event displayed the proper descriptions and details for the user experience, but the HTML is devoid of any "duplicate" product description content?
-
Hi Ryan,
It's going to be hard to do this without creating duplicates - if they aren't commissioning re-writes of descriptions but just pulling from the database, identical content like this is far from ideal.
One school of thought is that there really isn't any such thing as a "duplicate content penalty" unless you have some huge, gratuitous problem that results in a Panda issue. Google simply chooses the version of the content it favours and drops the other. The local site would still be much more relevant for a query like "fridge sale san antonio".
An example of a big retailer that has a similar(ish) site at the moment is Marks & Spencer Outlet here in the UK (outlet.marksandspencer.com). M&S is probably the most recognisable high street brand in the UK, to give you a perspective on size.
Looking at what they're doing, they're listing pages like this: http://outlet.marksandspencer.com/Limited-Edition-Jacquard-Textured-T69-1604J-S/dp/B00IIP7GY2?field_availability=-1&field_browse=1698309031&id=Limited+Edition+Jacquard+Textured+T69-1604J-S&ie=UTF8&refinementHistory=subjectbin%2Csize_name%2Ccolor_map%2Cbrandtextbin%2Cprice&searchNodeID=1698309031&searchPage=1&searchRank=-product_site_launch_date&searchSize=12
This is the same product as this: http://www.marksandspencer.com/jacquard-textured-coat-with-wool/p/p60056127. I love it that the "outlet" version is more expensive... anyway...
The product details, which are all included in the HTML of the main site, are not included in the Outlet page. The Outlet URL is indexed (what queries it ranks for / could potentially rank for are unknown) - but I would be keen to hypothesise / experiment with the idea that if that product was on a page about it only being available at M&S Moorgate, and looking for coats at M&S Moorgate was as popular a query as [fridge sale location], the Outlet page would rank.
You will never get an SEO to say that you should "copy and paste" descriptions across domains or within them, but essentially the pages have to provide a service / information that makes them worth ranking for relevant queries.
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
-
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
Question about duplicate listings on site for product listings.
We list products on our site and suspect that we have been hit by Panda as we are duplicating listings across our own site. Not intentionally, we just have multiple pages listings the same content as they fall into multiple categories. Has anyone else had the same issue and if so how did you deal with it?.. Have you seen a change in results/rankings due to the changes you made?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
Product Tag Pages - Shopify
My website is Sportiqe.com. We sell t-shirts and use Shopify. We're finding that Google is assigning a higher than normal (normal being "1") page authority ranking on our product tag pages (ie - Products Tagged "knicks"). Would it make sense to do 301 redirects for these product tag pages to the Product pages we want to rank for? (ie - would we do a 301 redirect for a page called "Products Tagged 'Knicks'" to our "New York Knicks Shirts" page?) OR Would it make sense to change these Product Tag Page titles to another key term to have multiple search results (assuming that ordering the products in a different way would eliminate any Duplicate Page Content issues?) For example, renaming the page title from "Products Tagged Knicks" to "TAG NAME | Sportiqe Apparel" Appreciate any insight from the Moz community, Shopify store managers and fellow t-shirt enthusiasts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | farmiloe0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
What to do with non-existing products (removed products)?
Hello, I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display. In order not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products. The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up). What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct? ---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO --------- The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...) Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination). Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two. Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product. The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012... Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar. Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's? Thanks0 -
Does a page on a site with high domain authority build page authority easier? i.e. less inbound links?
Is this also why people build backlinks to their BBB profiles, Yellowpages Profiles, etc. i.e. why do people build backlinks to other pages that link to them? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to just build that backlink directly to your target?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg0 -
What is the Ideal Structure for User Generated Product Reviews on My Site?
I apologize for the lengthy post, but I need help! Here is my current structure for product reviews: My product pages displays a set number of user product reviews before displaying a link to "see all reviews". So: http://www.domain.com/product/product-page Has product details, specs (usually generic from manufacturer) and 5 user product reviews. If there are more than 5, there is a link to see all reviews: http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=1 Where each page would display 10 user product reviews, and paginate until all user reviews are displayed. I am thinking about using the Rel Canonical tag on the paginated reviews pages to reference back to the main product page. So: http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=1 http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=2 http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=3 Would have the canonical URL of: http://www.domain.com/product/product-page Does this structure make sense? I'm unclear what strategy I should use, but currently the product review pages account for less than 2% of overall organic traffic. Thanks ahead of time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Corp0 -
Working out exactly how Google is crawling my site if I have loooots of pages
I am trying to work out exactly how Google is crawling my site including entry points and its path from there. The site has millions of pages and hundreds of thousands indexed. I have simple log files with a time stamp and URL that google bot was on. Unfortunately there are hundreds of thousands of entries even for one day and as it is a massive site I am finding it hard to work out the spiders paths. Is there any way using the log files and excel or other tools to work this out simply? Also I was expecting the bot to almost instantaneously go through each level eg. main page--> category page ---> subcategory page (expecting same time stamp) but this does not appear to be the case. Does the bot follow a path right through to the deepest level it can/allowed to for that crawl and then returns to the higher level category pages at a later time? Any help would be appreciated Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soeren.hofmayer0