Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content

[ExperienceOz]

Hey all,

We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product.

In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include:

• making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs)
• adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can)
• manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue).

Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen.

Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online.

Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!

[benjaminspak]

This has images. Even bosses can understand those.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2129359/How-Search-Engines-Use-Machine-Learning-for-Pattern-Detection

[EGOL]

I would tell the boss that we have Door A... Door B... and Door C.   Doors A and B are crap at low cost, Door C is yields better results but at much higher cost.

Estimate the amount of money you make per page on current site... then estimate cost of unique content writing per page and present the comparison to the boss and let him pick a door.