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
-
Why i get bad results since 4 monthh ago
hi...i have website...and i was in first place in page1 since 4 month ago. but somehow i take 5th place . its weird because whin compare my moz results there really better in number and better da and pa and lower spam score. why they get better result in my main kewords???!!! this is my website saadatrent.com and this is main keyword "اجاره ماشین" + "اجاره خودرو"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | avaye0 -
Is it good or bad to add noindex for empty pages, which will get content dynamically after some days
We have followers, following, friends, etc pages for each user who creates account on our website. so when new user sign up, he may have 0 followers, 0 following and 0 friends, but over period of time he can get those lists go up. we have different pages for followers, following and friends which are allowed for google to index. When user don't have any followers/following/friends, those pages looks empty and we get issue of duplicate content and description too short. so is it better that we add noindex for those pages temporarily and remove noindex tag when there are at least 2 or more people on those pages. What are side effects of adding noindex when there is no data on those page or benefits of it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | swapnil120 -
I've screwed up. Domain pointers I forgot about. Think I am getting dinged by google.
Hey all. I setup some domain pointers for a client 8 years ago and now think they are hurting them. I am afraid google thinks it duplicate content. They are pointers so you can get to the same page using other domain names. Is my best approach to do a 301 redirect on them? The client is on a shared host so I have to use the web.config file. The site is pretty small so doing it for the 10+ pages is not that big of a deal. My question is this? When should I drop those pointers from the website altogether?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougDeVore0 -
Wrong page getting ranked
Hi all, we have product category pages on our ecommerce web site and we also produce blog content (such as buyers guides, setup guides etc) to help with ranking and give our site some good quality, unique content. However we are sometimes finding that the buyers guide / blog content gets ranked by Google over our product category page. I'm hoping, if I give an example or two, some one smart out there may be able to point me in the right direction as to how we can avoid this and get the product category page ranked instead? You will see from my examples we are linking internally using the keywords from the buyers guides to the product category pages in order to show the most important page to Google for these keywords and are trying to structure the product category pages as well as possible to make it the most optimized page for the term. Example: Keyword "twin dvd player"... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/ ... blog page actually getting ranked for this keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/dual-screen-and-twin-dvd-player-explained/ Keyword "site radio".... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/audio/radio/site-radio/ .... blog buyer guide page actually getting ranked for keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/Site-radio-buying-guide/ Any help / pointers appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasef0 -
How to get rid from unwanted backlinks
Hello, Before joining seomoz I was desperate to hire seo expert for my website and each posts on my website. I did some research and found some cheap services on fiverr.com as I didn't had huge marketing budget and I purchased some services (gig) on fiverr.com to add many backlinks to my latest post. Now before ordering this services I was on 3rd page of Google for my relevant keywords but after adding backlinks I am not on first 50 pages for my specific keywords. I admit that when I was on 3rd page the competition for my keywords was about 50,000 (with comma ofcourse) and now it is 186,000 so I do believe that competition is increased but I didn't expect such a drop in rankings. I suspect that may be Google put my site far behind because of so much backlinks and that too generated within one week. I didn't know that it will cause such a drop in rankings. I even suspect that may be there were spam backlinkgs or linkings which google doesn't like. So my question is first of all how do I know that is there any backlinks on my website or posts which can harm my rankings and if yes how do I get rid of them. Please guide me as I want to do proper and genuine seo which google likes and finally my rankings get better. Thanks Bhadresh
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
How do I get 2 column Google sitelinks instead of one line sitelinks?
Currently, if you search for my site's brand name on Google, we are the top result. However, rather than having 2 columns of sitelinks, there is just one line of 4 sitelinks. When you search for the site's domain (sitename.com), you get the full 2 columns of sitelinks. Are there any strategies for getting the 2 columns on more than just the domain name search? At the very least, I'd like to get 2 columns to appear when you do a brand name search, but it'd be great to get 2 columns of sitelinks for our top search queries as well. Thanks for the advice...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
How can i get high ranking on yahoo?
My search terms are highly visible on Google but is hardly visible on Yahoo. This has been the case for a few months. What can I do to boost my ranking on Yahoo? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csknight0 -
Getting rid of a site in Google
Hi, I have two sites, lets call them site A and site B, both are sub domains of the same root domain. Because of a server config error, both got indexed by Google. Google reports millions of inbound links from Site B to Site A I want to get rid of Site B, because its duplicate content. First I tried to remove the site from webmaster tools, and blocking all content in the robots.txt for site B, this removed all content from the search results, but the links from site B to site A still stayed in place, and increased (even after 2 months) I also tried to change all the pages on Site B to 404 pages, but this did not work either I then removed the blocks, cleaned up the robots.txt and changed the server config on Site B so that everything redirects (301) to a landing page for Site B. But still the links in Webmaster Tools to site A from Site B is on the increase. What do you think is the best way to delete a site from google and to delete all the links it had to other sites so that there is NO history of this site? It seems that when you block it with robots.txt, the links and juice does not disappear, but only the blocked by robots.txt report on WMT increases Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JacoRoux0