Ecommerce

[ResslerMotors]

I'm the Marketing Director at a car dealership that is trying to break into online shopping.  We have had an internet sales team for about 4 years handling online leads.  These leads were generated by forms present on our website.  However, I'm trying to step up our production of leads online (we are currently at 1-2%).

Here's my problem:

The current method that car dealership website developers use, at least the 4 I've utilized, makes all the search pages have duplicate content, and many of the product/car pages have duplicate content (Title, etc.).  Is there a way to stop all of these search pages from coming up as duplicate content?

My other question is:

Our inventory completely refreshes about every two months, what would be the best option for our product web pages?

Should I no-index them?

301 redirect to a similar vehicle?

Any better options?

Thanks

[rhutchings]

Agree with EGOL on the complexity of this issue.  Seeping decisions on this can be dangerous.  One point I will speak to is the duplicate content on the search results issue.  I assume you are running into this problem because your search results pages are being indexed by google, and many of them show similar content.  There is no consensus on this issue right now, even from Google.  They will not penalize, however, because of duplicated content found in search results.  So i wouldnt worry about that problem right now.

As for the expired/sold inventory pages, i would say to either redirect to a more permanent page (like a ford explorer sub category page for all explorers) or you just delete those pages, making sure that you manage your sitemaps and urls on a regular basis.  But that usually takes too much time.

[moondog604]

I am not sure what platform you are using to maintain your inventory list online. So I am unable to give you a direct answer.

Making assumptions however I would suggest to start using the canonical tag to direct all of your similar listings to the cars you think are the best quality to list.

When you delete a listing it would also be helpful to make sure you also have the ability to specify where to 301 Redirect them to. You should also try to stay on top of of where these redirects point to. If you have one car they all point to and now that car is no longer active and it redirects some other car, it would begin making the other redirects less effective. All of this would be best handled through custom programming so it would maintain the redirects automatically.

If you were to try to no-index them you could potentially be losing out on the incoming link value to a specific car should people link to it.

[EGOL]

I believe that there are many ways to approach this.  However, the methods that will have the best results depends upon the amount of skill, time and expertise your business can put into content, into running the site and into promoting it. Add onto that the way that you hope that the site will work to acquire and deliver the leads.

I believe that quickly considered answers tossed out in a Q&A have a greater chance of missing the mark than hitting it.

My advice would be to hire a person to understand your business model, learn about the resources that you can put into the site and then come up with a plan that will deliver the best results.

Ten minute answers are wildly thrown darts.