Duplicate ecommerce domains and canonical

[Estherpuntu]

Hi everybody!

I'd like to discuss the SEO strategy I've thought regarding a client of mine and ask for help because it's a serious case of duplicate content.

There is a main website (the business model one) where he compares the cost of medicines in several pharmacies, to show the cheapest shopping cart to the customer. But the shopping has to been made in another domain, within the selected pharmacie, because my country's law in Europe says that is compulsory to sell the medicines only on the pharmacy website.

So my client has started to create domains, one for each pharmacy, where the differences between them are only some products, the business information of the pharmacy and the template's colour. But all of them shares the same product data base.

My aim is to rank the comparing website (it contains all the products), not each pharmacy, so I've started to create different content for this one. Should I place rel=canonical in the pharmacies domains t the original one? For instance:

www.pharmacie1.com >> www.originaltorank.com

www.pharmacie2.com >> www.originaltorank.com

www.pharmacie1.com/product-10 >> www.originaltorank.com/product-10

I've already discuss the possibilities to focus all the content in only one website, but it's compulsory to have different domains in order to sell medicines

By the way, I can't redirect 301 because I need these websites exist for the same reason (the law)

He is creating 1-3 new domains every week so obviously he has had a drop in his SEO traffic that I have to solve this fast.

Do you think the canonical will be the best solution? I dont want to noindex these domains beacuse we're creating Google Local pages for each one in order to be found in their villages.

Please, I'll appreciate any piece of advice. Thanks!

[Estherpuntu]

Thanks very much for your answer Dirk!

Yes, I'm not totally sure this is going to work but canonical is the best solution that came to my mind... It's a difficult situation. This is why I want to be totally transparent to Google to show that I don't want to do spam, but only searching for a solution.

Your idea regarding the products it's really smart, thanks!

Please if somebody thinks that it exists a better solution I want to know it!

[DirkC]

You could start with putting a canonical url like you mentioned. Not sure if it's going to work - the way you describe the situation it seems like an old spam technique - creating thin content sites to create links to the main domain. Canonicals could still be considered as "links" to the main domain.

As you want to have the products indexed on the main domain you could noindex the product part on the individual pharmacie sites (noindex doesn't have to be done on domain level). That way you could still have the sites having Google Local pages & on the other hand be sure that Google will only index the products on the main site.

Dirk