Duplicate Content within Website - problem?

[OzDave]

Hello everyone,

I am currently working on a big site which sells thousands of widgets.  However each widget has ten sub widgets (1,2,3... say)

My strategy with this site is to target the long tail search so I'm creating static pages for each possibly variation.

So I'll have a main product page on widgets in general, and also a page on widget1, page on widget2 etc etc.

I'm anticipating that because there's so much competition for searches relating to widgets in general, I'll get most of my traffic from people being more specific and searching for widget1 or widget 7 etc.

Now here's the problem - I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget.  However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles.

So... what do I do with the content.  Put it on the main widget page was the plan but what do I do about the sub pages.  I could put it there and it would make perfect sense to a reader and be relevant to people specifically looking for widget1, say, but could there be a issue with it being viewed as duplicate content.

One idea was to just put a snippet (first 100 words) on each sub page with a link back to the main widget page where the full copy would be.

Not sure whether I've made myself clear at all but hopefully I have - or I can clarify.

Thanks so much in advance

David

[EGOL]

What's wrong with having ten brass widgets in ten different colors and ten buy buttons all listed on a single page?

I do that I we see lots of people buying a brass widget in every color.  I think that this is great for getting more sales.  If I was a shopper it would be a real frustration to visit ten pages to get one of each color - or just visit all of those pages to see which color I like best.

Most important, Google might see that and say....  This page has brass widgets in EVERY FREEKING COLOR! and decide to show it to visitors who search for them.

Now, if you are compulsive about having one page per widget and having your writer create yada yada yada content for all of them, keep in mind that you are wasting a lot of money on near duplicate content, boring your writers and spreading your pagerank out over a lot of pages.

[oznappies]

David, the sub-pages as far as Goggle was concerned fed all the juice to the product page.

No the subpages were not indexed as we told Google they all came from the same page in the canonical.

How do you describe a red widget1 differently to blue widget1? The item is the same but there is only one word different in the content, so we decided to skip a physically different url for the different colours and just use different anchors on the thumbnail images. The title and alt tags would contain specific information about the colour of the widget.

If someone searches for red widget1 and we have keyword strength in widget1 they will get to the widget1 page where they will see the red widget1 and any other colours for that widget1.

The canonical allows you to specify the content origin. So if you have /category/widget1/red and /category/widget1/blue describing the same content you could use /category/widget1 in the canonical ref and both pages would give juice to the main page and get no duplicate content penality.

This only works if you have a small number of variants on each widget as Ryan pointed out, such as size, colour variations etc. Otherwise it is too confusing for humans to follow.

With the amount of content you are looking at, it is probably worthwhile getting a usability study done.

[RyanKent]

SEO = Manipulation doesn't it?

You can call me naive but those days of SEO are either gone or disappearing fast.

I view SEO as working to understand the ever-changing metrics search engines use to rank search results, then applying that knowledge to websites.

We are manipulated into improving our sites to provide a better user experience. The changes we make have lasting value. Other forms of SEO are always one update away from making a post asking "what happened to my site's rankings?"

[OzDave]

Thanks for the replies, guys.

Oznappies - did that structure mean that all your subproduct pages were pretty much devoid of link juice?  Were they even indexed?  The big question is if someone searhed for 'red product a' which page showed up?  Excuse my ignorance re the canonical stuff.

Ryan,  Yes you are right to some degree.  I am reverse engineering the website so to speak.   But nevertheless I plan to offer huge value to visitors - I have spared little expense with the content writing, usability etc plus we have some fairly radical ideas that should be hugely popular with the visitors.

But I take exception that this is the wrong way to go about it.  SEO = Manipulation doesn't it?  The old adage 'Just make great content then users will find it and link to it and you'll dominate the serps' is a great theory but we all know in practise it doesn't work like that in 99% of the cases.  To get your great product out there you have to give it a push, find an angle to exploit and this targeting of long tail is my angle.

It will be a great site I assure you

[RyanKent]

If the widgets are truly different products, then they should have separate product pages. If you have a weather widget, a currency exchange widget, a local time widget, etc. then you can clearly build unique content for each page.

If you offer a widget in different colors, sizes, etc. but it is really the same widget, you can't effectively generate new content for each page. Your best approach is creating a single, strong page for the widget. The "blue", "yellow" and other widget pages should be canonicalized to the main widget page.

I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget.  However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles.

That sums it up pretty well. You are having content "written" which often means it is not quality content. You are not willing to write unique content for each sub widget either. You are not developing your site for the best user experience, but instead to manipulate search engine traffic. Google is focused on preventing you from doing exactly what you are trying to do. Even if you succeed, you will be back here in a couple months asking "why did my site drop so far" after Google makes an update to adjust for this type of manipulation.

You have two options. Condense all your content to one widget page, or develop each widget page as if it was the only page on your website. When you sit down and think "I have 10k pages and I need to have content on all of them" your content will be inferior to other sites, and your SERP will reflect as much.

[oznappies]

We had a similar issue but not to that scale. We had product A in Red, Blue, Green etc the first approach we used a url /category/product?id=subproduct and set id as a parameter in Google Webmaster Tools site config. This passed all the link juice to /category/product and ensured that all pages had the appropriate for the link juice page.

We then decided that all those page loads just to basically show an image for each subproduct were a pain for the customer and so decided to show small images on the /category/product page an use a jquery call to overlay a larger image when the customer clicked a particular product. This produced faster load time and better customer experience.