Duplicate content, website authority and affiliates
-
We've got a dilemma at the moment with the content we supply to an affiliate. We currently supply the affiliate with our product database which includes everything about a product including the price, title, description and images. The affiliate then lists the products on their website and provides a Commission Junction link back to our ecommerce store which tracks any purchases with the affiliate getting a commission based on any sales via a cookie.
This has been very successful for us in terms of sales but we've noticed a significant dip over the past year in ranking whilst the affiliate has achieved a peak...all eyes are pointing towards the Panda update.
Whenever I type one of our 'uniquely written' product descriptions into Google, the affiliate website appears higher than ours suggesting Google has ranked them the authority.
My question is, without writing unique content for the affiliate and changing the commission junction link. What would be the best option to be recognised as the authority of the content which we wrote in the first place? It always appears on our website first but Google seems to position the affiliate higher than us in the SERPS after a few weeks. The commission junction link is written like this:
-
It seems like maybe we're getting off topic. Why does the affiliate have to suffer in order for the merchant to succeed and vice versa? The real problem here seems to be that you are giving your affiliates the same content you use on your own site. Either make them write their own content or change what's on your site and feed them the old content. It is more work, but you could start slowly by writing fresh (exclusive) content on your site for the most important products. This would give you the ability to test it out unless there is some site-wide (e.g. Panda) issue going on .
As both an affiliate and a merchant, I've always found it best if each has their own content. For one thing, the affiliate site sits earlier in the funnel so it would make sense that they wouldn't be using the same message as the merchant sites product detail page, which is about as far into the funnel as you can get without being inside a shopping cart.
If you are unwilling to do this I think EGOL said it best:
"However, if your rankings are falling it could be competitors (and your good affiliates) are working harder than you."
If you really want to be seen as the authoritative version when there are multiple sites with the same content, the biggest factor in my experience is simply links. Domain authority plays a role too, but a couple of deep links into your product page will make all the difference. I presented about some ways to get links into product and category pages at SMX West, 2012 (link to presentation) and also wrote a blog post about it here on SEOMoz. Hopefully that will help you get started, but there's no easy, scaleable way to do this that isn't a little bit on the gray side. To do it "right" in Google's eyes just takes a lot of elbow grease.
One last thing. As an affilaite there is no way I would agree to putting a cross domain rel canonical or rel author tag on my site that points to the merchant's site. You would lose any affiliate worth their weight in salt that way.
To sum things up for Gavin, here are your two options as I see it, but they aren't mutually exclusive:
1. Rewrite your descriptions and either give the old descriptions to affiliates (e.g. have a database with two different descriptions for every product) or stop giving descriptions to affiliates and make them write their own.2. Build more external links into your product pages.
-
I wouldn't do that, because it might take traffic away from the affiliate, but the main site may not generate enough extra income to recover from the shortfall.
There is no point in ranking higher than the affiliate, if you destroy the affiliate's business, but do not recover it all yourself.
This is the age-old sales problem. Many companies, when they have a great salesman, who always exceeds his targets, change the quotas, to make it harder for the salesman to hit his number, so he works harder, the company makes more and he makes less. Eventually, the salesman will stop working so hard, and then look for another job.
Good salesmen and good affiliates are definitely not a dime-a-dozen. Look after them.
-
Whenever I type one of our 'uniquely written' product descriptions into Google, the affiliate website appears higher than ours suggesting Google has ranked them the authority.
You are lucky to have a powerful affiliate selling your merchandise instead of your competitor's merchandise.
I am an affiliate of a couple of programs and my site always ranks above the program site and this is good for me and good for them because I can defeat competitors that they can not.
There are a few issues to think about related to the duplicate content.....
-
The affiliate might rank above you for quotes from the descriptions, however how do they rank for important keywords that have high search volumes and conversion rates? I would guess that is where the money is being made. If you are above them there then not so many worries. But if they are outranking you there then they are an important rainmaker for your business.
-
This duplicate content could be causing Panda problems for your site, especially if many other affiliates are using it. Some of the sites publishing it are likely to be demoted in the google rankings. However, if your rankings are falling it could be competitors (and your good affiliates) are working harder than you. Consider how much you have invested in making good rankings... if not a lot then your affiliates are fighting that battle for you.
-
The affiliate programs that I sell for have enjoyed the sales that I have produced for over ten years. We have a great relationship and they are fairly confident that I am not going to leave them for a competitor program. They have the best product in the niche and they pay me well. I am one of many affiliates for their company who have been with them for a long time. So, their attitude is.... let the affiliates to the SEO and the PPC... that is what they are good at. We are good at making a great product and servicing customers... this is win-win.
They know something else that is very important. They know that they are THE BRAND and lots of the customers that I refer may make purchases in the future that no commissions are paid on. That is where they win big time.
So, keep your affiliates happy. Over the long term they will be responsible for a LOT of your best repeat customers (if you have a repeat type of business and treat the customer right).
Good affiliates are also really smart about SEO and converting customers. They might know more than you. So, if you ask them to do rel=canonical or some other trick that works to your advantage they might jump to another program or simply become retailers instead of affiliates. I have done that a couple of times.
-
-
You can do a rel=author from the affiliate site to the original content. This recent post has some information that can help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building
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 but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
Duplicate Content... Really?
Hi all, My site is www.actronics.eu Moz reports virtually every product page as duplicate content, flagged as HIGH PRIORITY!. I know why. Moz classes a page as duplicate if >95% content/code similar. There's very little I can do about this as although our products are different, the content is very similar, albeit a few part numbers and vehicle make/model. Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowoody
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/audi-a4-8d-b5-1994-2000-abs-ecu-en/bosch-5-3
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/bmw-3-series-e36-1990-1998-abs-ecu-en/ate-34-51 Now, multiply this by ~2,000 products X 7 different languages and you'll see we have a big dupe content issue (according to Moz's Crawl Diagnostics report). I say "according to Moz..." as I do not know if this is actually an issue for Google? 90% of our products pages rank, albeit some much better than others? So what is the solution? We're not trying to deceive Google in any way so it would seem unfair to be hit with a dupe content penalty, this is a legit dilemma where our product differ by as little as a part number. One ugly solution would be to remove header / sidebar / footer on our product pages as I've demonstrated here - http://woodberry.me.uk/test-page2-minimal-v2.html since this removes A LOT of page bloat (code) and would bring the page difference down to 80% duplicate.
(This is the tool I'm using for checking http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php) Other "prettier" solutions would greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks,
Woody 🙂1 -
Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
If so how bad? We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues. We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all. Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings. Before I do, can you give me some advice around this? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_B
Daniel.0 -
Does having a page that ends with ? cause duplicate content?
I am working on a site that has lots of dynamic parameters. So lets say we have www.example.com/page?parameter=1 When the page has no parameters you can still end up at www.example.com/page? Should I redirect this to www.example.com/page/ ? Im not sure if Google ignores this, or if these pages need to be dealt with. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Dynamic 301's causing duplicate content
Hi, wonder if anyone can help? We have just changed our site which was hosted on IIS and the page url's were like this ( example.co.uk/Default.aspx?pagename=About-Us ). The new page url is example.co.uk/About-Us/ and is using Apache. The 301's our developer told us to use was in this format: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/Default.aspx$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoGroup51
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^pagename=About-Us$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/About-Us/ [R=301,L] This seemed to work from a 301 point of view; however it also seemed to allow both of the below URL's to give the same page! example.co.uk/About-Us/?pagename=About-Us example.co.uk/About-Us/ Webmaster Tools has now picked up on this and is seeing it a duplicate content. Can anyone help why it would be doing this please. I'm not totally clued up and our host/ developer cant understand it too. Many Thanks0 -
Duplicate content even with 301 redirects
I know this isn't a developer forum but I figure someone will know the answer to this. My site is http://www.stadriemblems.com and I have a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file to redirect all non-www to www and it works great. But SEOmoz seems to think this doesn't apply to my blog, which is located at http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog It doesn't seem to make sense that I'd need to place code in every .htaccess file of every sub-folder. If I do, what code can I use? The weirdest part about this is that the redirecting works just fine; it's just SEOmoz's crawler that doesn't seem to be with the program here. Does this happen to you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
SEOMoz mistaking image pages as duplicate content
I'm getting duplicate content errors, but it's for pages with high-res images on them. Each page has a different, high-res image on it. But SEOMoz keeps telling me it's duplicate content, even though the images are different (and named different). Is this something I can ignore or will Google see it the same way too?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHT0