URL Structure for Deal Aggregator

[andywozhere]

I have a website that aggregates deals from various daily deals site. I originally had all the deals on one page /deals, however I thought that maybe it might be more useful to have several pages e.g. /beautydeals or /hoteldeals. However if I give every section it's own page that means I have either no current deals on the main /deals page or I will have duplicate content. I'm wondering what might be the best approach here? A few of the options that come to mind are:

1. Return to having all the deals on one page /deals and linking internally to content within that page
2. Have both a main /deals page with all of the deals plus other pages such as /beautydeals, but add re="canonical" to point to the main /deals page
3. Create new content for the /deals page... however I think people will probably want to see at least some deals straight away, rather than having to click through to another page.
4. Display some sub-categories on the main /deals page, but have separate URLs for other more popular sub-categories e.g. /beautydeals (this is how it works at the moment)

I should probably point out that the site also has other content such as events and a directory. Any suggestions on how best to approach this much appreciated!

Cheers,

Andy

[jws8118]

Could you consider a version of option 4?

Main deal page could feature the top 3-5 deals of each of your most popular subcategories.  Then your category pages feature all the deals for that category so it doesn't seem like there would be a duplicate content issue with this approach.  This also seems to be a user-centric approach b/c it allows people to see a variety of deals on the main page and they are being curated by popularity of category and top 3-5 best sellers within the category.

Does that make sense?

[TomRayner]

Hi Andy

Think it's very wise of you to have considered this potential duplicate content problem.

Having a rel=canonical tag on the separate categories, or even a  tag on them, would make sure that the URL is not indexed in Google, thus removing any potential duplicate content.

I can't really see a way of having both a main deals URL and a category deals URL both being indexed and ranking because, as you have said, the pages would either have zero content or duplicate content.

With that in mind, I think you're current format is the best one.  Having a big /deals page with all your offers on it will hopefully provide lots of rich content so that people will link to the page, which in turn will rank the page for a number of keywords - while you're also allowing people to filter down and get to what they want.  Just make sure that the separate sub-category pages have either enough unique content on them, or a canonical/meta noindex tag on them to avoid a duplicate content issue.

I would say though that as you're site aggregates daily deals, you are at a bit of a risk of still supplying duplicate content from other sites.  I'm not sure how the deals are fed in, but if you get a rush of deals en masse from one website and the deal's titles and descriptions are all the same, this might also be seen as duplicate.  If you can off-set this with unique content on the page and a system to put in your own titles/descriptions, then it shouldn't be a problem.

Good question this - would be interested to see some other Mozzer's POVs.