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
-
Using Similar Expired URLs to Send Traffic to My Site
Thanks in advance for any help! I have an existing website with content on a particular topic. I have discovered a few similar expired URLs that might still get some traffic. One in particular still has a number of valid links from other sites. Would it make sense for me to buy those URLs (which are really cheap) and just use them to send that traffic to my site? If so, am I better using a 301 redirect or having a home page on the new site that just mentions that the old site is expired, and that they might want to instead link over to my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alanjosephs0 -
Product page as homepage
Hello, Is it ok that to use the homepage of website as a product page directly where you present all your products on your homepage or can it penalise you to do that ? and in that case, is it better to have a homepage that you don't rank and create a subpage for your product page. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Cache and index page of Mobile site
Hi, I want to check cache and index page of mobile site. I am checking it on mobile phone but it is showing the cache version of desktop. So anybody can tell me the way(tool, online tool etc.) to check mobile site index and cache page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
404 Pages. Can I change it to do this without getting penalized ? I want to lower our bounce rate from these pages to encourage the user to continue on the site
Hi All, We have been streaming our site and got rid of thousands of pages for redundant locations (Basically these used to be virtual locations where we didn't have a depot although we did deliver there and most of them was duplicate/thin content etc ). Most of them have little if any link value and I didn't want to 301 all of them as we already have quite a few 301's already We currently display a 404 page but I want to improve on this. Current 404 page is - http://goo.gl/rFRNMt I can get my developer to change it, so it will still be a 404 page but the user will see the relevant category page instead ? So it will look like this - http://goo.gl/Rc8YP8 . We could also use Java script to show the location name etc... Would be be okay ? or would google see this as cheating. basically I want to lower our bounce rates from these pages but still be attractive enough for the user to continue in the site and not go away. If this is not a good idea, then any recommendations on improving our current 404 would be greatly appreciated. thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Product Pages & Panda 4.0
Greeting MOZ Community: I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Of the 600 pages, about 350 of the URLs are product pages, written about specific listings. The content on these pages is quite short, sometimes only 20 words. My ranking has dropped very much since mid-May, around the time of the new Panda update. I suspect it has something to do with the very short product pages, the 350 listing pages. What is the best way to deal with these pages so as to recover ranking. I am considering these options: 1. Setting them to "no-index". But I am concerned that removing product pages is sending the wrong message to Google. 2. Enhancing the content and making certain that each page has at least 150-200 words. Re-writing 350 listings would be a real project, but if necessary to recover I will bite the bullet. What is the best way to address this issue? I am very surprised that Google does not understand that product URLs can be very brief and yet have useful content. Information about a potential office rental that lists location, size, price per square foot is valuable to the visitor but can be very brief. Especially listings that change frequently. So I am surprised by the penalty. Would I be better off not having separate URLs for the listings, and for instance adding them as posts within building pages? Is having separate URLs for product pages with minimal content a bad idea from an SEO perspective? Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can recover from this latest Panda penalty? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
What causes internal pages to have a page rank of 0 if the home page is PR 5?
The home page PageRank is 5 but every single internal page is PR 0. Things I know I need to address each page has 300 links (Menu problem). Each article has 2-3 duplicates caused from the CMS working on this now. Has anyone else had this problem before? What things should I look out for to fix this issue. All internal linking is follow there is no page rank sculpting happening on the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBrent0 -
What are best SEO practices for product pages of unique items when the item is no longer available?
Hello, my company sells used cars though a website. Each vehicle page contains photos and details of the unit, but once the vehicle is sold, all the contents are replaced by a simple text like "this vehicle is not available anymore".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Darioz
Title of the page also change to a generic one.
URL remains the same. I doubt this is the correct way of doing, but I cannot understand what method would be better. The improvement I am considering for pages of no longer available vehicles is this: keep the page alive but with reduced vehicle details, a text like: this vehicles is not available anymore and automatic recommendations for similar items. What do you think? Is this a good practice or do you suggest anything different? Also, should I put a NOINDEX tag on the expired vehicles pages? Thank you in advance for your help.0