Duplicate Content Dilemma for Category and Brand Pages

[soralsokal]

Hi,

I have a online shop with categories such as:

• Trousers
• Shirts
• Shoes
• etc.

But now I'm having a problem with further development.
I'd like to introduce brand pages. In this case I would create new categories for Brand 1, Brand 2, etc... The text on categories and brand pages would be unique. But there will be an overlap in products.

How do I deal with this from a duplicate content perspective?

I'm appreciate your suggestions.

Best, Robin

[AMHC]

Wow. I did some research. I stand corrected. Thanks, Linda.

As far as your categories go, you could have:

www.Domain.com/computers/notebooks/apple-notebooks/

and

www.domain.com/apple-products/

On your category pages, I'd suggest adding unique content at the bottom of the category pages. A paragraph above the fold would help for ranking purposes, but may detract from usability and conversions.

[soralsokal]

Thank you for the time you've invested in this answer. This gives me a good sense on what to do.

I like option 2 the best. But not sure whether I got it right. What do you think of the following scenario (taking the Apple example you provided):

1. I have a category page with notebooks. The title, description and text on this category is focusing on notebooks in general. The products include Dell, HP and Apple.
   => This is basically the setup, which I have in my shop right now.
2. Now I want to create a brand page for Apple. There the title, description and text is focused on Apple in general. The products include Apple Notebooks, iPhones, iPads ect.

Now here's the point: Title, description and text for the notebook category and Apple brand page will be different (unique content). But products are part of content too, aren't they? And since there will be a overlap in products, this would result in duplicate content for featured products.

But I want both pages to rank. One for 'notebook' and the other one for 'apple'.

Is that possible, or are partially overlapping products in those 2 categories a dealbreaker for my SEO?

[Linda-Vassily]

According to Moz: "Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to utilize the rel=canonical tag. The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and often takes much less development time to implement." http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

Why do you think it does not pass ranking power?

[AMHC]

This is a difficult question. I would agree with patrick_g that canonicals are one way to handle duplicate content, but canonicals don't pass link juice to the parent, unless it's through a link.

The canonical tag only tells google which page to index. It does not transfer link juice as does a 301 redirect. Read up on this.

Here are some good choices:

1. if the brands are only for use experience purposes, you could make the pages noindex, follow. This would eliminate the duplicate content issue, and the brands could serve as a link juice hub. They would be kept out of google's index, but would still pass link juice.

2. Create unique content for the brand pages, and give them a title tag and content that differs from the competing page. For example if you already have an "Apple" page, make the new page "Certified Apple Products" (or some other KW).

3. This one requires some programming skill, and is a little controversial. Put the new pages in a parent folder "/hide/" (don't actually use the word "hide"). Put all the new pages in that folder, and disallow the parent folder in robots.txt. Any links on your site to these pages would pass link juice to these pages, which would be lost, and could be a significant link juice drain. Here's the controversial part - put the links to those pages in an iframe, and disallow the iframe folder in robots.txt. This would prevent bots from crawling those links and passing link juice.

[Patrick_G]

Hello soralsokal,

I don't have a bunch of products like you, but generally I prefer to use the rel=canocial tag to push the link juice to the one category page I'm trying to get ranked well. So I still build out the various pages I want, but don't expect the duplicate content to be ranked.

I suppose you could also put them in your Robots.txt file to block them from search engines. I've done that with a blog that packed the blog posts in all sort of different categories, thus creating duplicate content.