Query based site; duplicate content; seo juice flow.

[andy.bigbangthemes]

Hi guys,

We're planning on starting a Saas based service where we'll be selling different skins. Let's say WordPress themes, though it's not about that. Say we have an url called site.com/ and we would like to direct all seo juice to the mother landing page /best-wp-themes/ but then have that juice flow towards our additional pages:

/best-wp-themes/?id=Mozify
/best-wp-themes/?id=Fiximoz

/best-wp-themes/?id=Mozicom

Challenges:

1. our content would be formatted like this:
a. Same content - features

b. Same content - price

c. Different content - each theme will have its own set of features / design specs.

d. Same content - testimonials.

How would be go about not being penalised by SE's for the duplicate content, but still have the /?id=whatever pages be indexed with proper content?

2. How do we go about making sure SEO juice flows to the /?id pages too?Basically it's the same thing with different skins.

Thanks for the help!

[badgergravling]

No problem. And there are ways around presenting the same content differently. It's hard to be specific without being able to know what the product is, but it's something I've had to solve for various clients, whether it's been for software or actual products.

[andy.bigbangthemes]

Dan,

Thanks for your time to address this question. Now it's all very clear. The problem wasn't that we don't want to invest time - but rather than there can be only so many ways in which you can present the same overall thing. It's clear now that there's no quick fire solution for this. Thank you for taking the time to address my question and help out.

Andy

[badgergravling]

So you want to rank at the top of search results and get people to pay for your products, but you can't invest the time to write some decent content for 20 pages?

You don't get penalised for duplicate content - what happens is that all except one result will be filtered out generally. Or you'll be seen as low quality and won't rank for any... You can canonicalise all the pages to 1 main page which will have a better chance of ranking, and that will tell Google that you know it's duplicate content. But you'll only ever have that canonical example ranking - if that's better than investing in either creating unique content yourself or outsourcing it to someone that can, then that's the route to go.

[andy.bigbangthemes]

HI Dan,

Thanks for the answer however it's still not very clear. What exactly do you mean by "beef up unique features"? To try and "rewrite" them in a different way for each different product? That may not be feasible with over 20 different products to present. So would there be any way of telling google that we "know" that's duplicate content and not be penalised for this?

Thanks for everything else - cleared things big time for us.

[badgergravling]

Basically, beef up the unique set of features and design specs as much as possible. And you could hopefully build up unique testimonials pretty quickly. Or just select different ones from different products, so you're not duplicating them across every product you do.

In terms of 'SEO juice', why would you not just link to the individual pages as appropriate as much as possible? That will still raise the overall homepage in the same way as you're suggesting, but without trying to adjust the 'page rank sculpting' which has become less and less effective over the years. And just try to have as few links and navigation on the homepage as far as possible which don't point to your product pages. It's fine to nofollow links like a privacy policy or Terms and Conditions, but as for anything further, you get into potentially risky behaviour for a penalty.