Duplicate Page Content on Empty Manufacturer Pages

[ElDude]

I work for an internet retailer that specializes in pet supplies and medications. I was going through the Crawl Diagnostics for our website, and I saw in the Duplicate Page Content section that some of our manufacturer pages were getting flagged.

The way our site is set up is that when products are discontinued we mark them as discontinued and use 301 redirects to redirect their URLs to other relevant products, brands, or our homepage. We do the same thing with brand and manufacturer pages if all of their products are discontinued. 90% of the time, this is a manual process.

However, the other 10% of the time certain products come and go automatically as part of our inventory system with one of our fulfillment partners. This can sometimes create empty manufacturer pages. I can't redirect these empty pages because there's a chance that products will be brought back in stock and the page will be populated again.

What can we do so that these pages won't get marked as duplicates while they're empty? Write unique short descriptions about the companies? Would the placement of these short descriptions matter--top of the page under the category name vs bottom of the page underneath where the products would go? The links in the left sidebar, top, and in the footer our part of our site architecture, so those are always going to be the same.

To contrast, here's what a manufacturer page with products looks like:

Thanks!

http://www.vetdepot.com/littermaid-manufacturer.html

[dawnieando]

Yes, definitely add some unique content to these pages to reduce the levels of duplicate content which you're currently experiencing.  Hate to state the obvious, but be sure to avoid using any manufacturers standard descriptions as you can guarantee that they'll have been repeated on other sites who sell the products.

Your own unique product descriptions and also something which states that the product is not currently available, with some alternative suggestions perhaps may well help to deal with any negative user experience.

[TomRayner]

There's a few solutions here.  If we rule out any chance of deleting these pages (would deleting them effect your ability to create products from those manufacturers in the future? Not sure what system you're going with here), you can take steps to limit any adverse effect this could have.

First, you could add the following code to the head tag of your HTML:

This can be easy to implement, but robots and crawlers have been known to ignore this directive.

Alternatively, you can add text to your Robots.txt file, telling crawlers to ignore certain pages.  In this case, you might want to add:

User-Agent: * Allow: /
Disallow: */littermaid-manufacturer

You'd want to do this for all of those empty pages, but this could take time and can get quite messy if there's dozens of these pages you want to block.

I'd highly recommend implementing a rel=canonical system onto your site (I would even if you didn't have this problem).  This schema language can help to reduce any negative duplicate content effect.  SEOMoz provides a detailed canonical guide here, which I recommend reading through.

Finally, as you've mentioned, adding content to these pages would also be a good idea, regardless if they're in use.  If you had a detailed description, say roughly 300+ words (very broad figure, go as detailed as you can), it would dilute any duplicate content elements on the pages.  In addition, it will be useful to have on your page if and when products are eventually added to them, which can be very useful if you wish to optimise the page itself.  Put it in the first paragraph under your topnav for now and you can always move it later.

Hope this helps - to summarise, I'd recommend implementing rel=canonical on your site, adding content to those pages and, if you want them blocked from crawlers completely, add the pages to your robots.txt.

[CMC-SD]

Yes, I would add a company description to those pages, and make sure there is some text that explains that you do not currently carry that manufacturer's products.