Big retailers and duplicate content
-
Hello there!
I was wondering if you guys have experience with big retailers sites fetching data via API (PDP content etc.) from another domain which is also sharing the same data with other multiple sites.
If each retailer has thousands on products, optimizing PDP content (even in batches) is quite of a cumbersome task and rel="canonical" pointing to original domain will dilute the value.
How would you approach this type of scenario?
Looking forward to read your suggestions/experiences
Thanks a lot!
Best
Sara
-
Apologies for the very late reply but Thank you both Billy and Everett, really appreciate your feedback, I feel better and more confident on my next steps!
-
Billy,
This client has product detail pages ranking #3 with content that is duplicated verbatim on multi-merchant marketplaces like Amazon? Are you able to share what those keywords are, even in a private message? I ask out of curiosity because I usually don't see that. I usually see category pages ranking. But, as you said, sometimes you can do this with long tail keywords.
-
Don't let Everett's comments about "picking up the crumbs" discourage you. My client isn't isn't trying to be Amazon, Home Depot, or the Manufacturer. Bouncing around in spaces 3-6 for the most common keywords in their respective space has helped them build a very nice business. For them, and for you, long tail keywords are money!
Absolutely agree that having unique reviews on your site and third party sites make a huge difference in rankings.
-
Chances are you're going to lose with a lesser-known brand If you have the very same content as Amazon, eBay and Walmart. If you can customize the PDP content, I suggest choosing your top products and making those pages unique. If not, you may have to stick with optimizing category pages and picking up the crumbs for PDPs, as Billy alluded to.
Having unique reviews on your site for those products makes a huge difference.
-
My experience is the biggest Retailers aren't necessarily penalized for having the same content as other sites. I regularly compete with Amazon, Home Depot and two other websites for the same keywords from Motorola. Typically, Motorola, Amazon, and Home Depot win those top three spots with their canned data. Motorola should win as they're the manufacturer. The rest of us are competing for the the fourth spot on the page. The smaller competitors have better and deeper content. We even have higher Moz scores but still rank lower. So if you're one of the Big Boys don't sweat it so much. If you're not, start with your best selling sku and get busy.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Query based site; duplicate content; seo juice flow.
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andy.bigbangthemes
/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!0 -
Same product in different categories and duplicate content issues
Hi,I have some questions related to duplicate content on e-commerce websites. 1)If a single product goes to multiple categories (eg. A black elegant dress could be listed in two categories like "black dresses" and "elegant dresses") is it considered duplicate content even if the product url is unique? e.g www.website.com/black-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/elegant-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/black-elegant-dress unique url > this is the way my products urls look like Does google perceive this as duplicated content? The path to the content is only one, so it shouldn't be seen as duplicated content, though the product is repeated in different categories.This is the most important concern I actually have. It is a small thing but if I set this wrong all website would be affected and thus penalised, so I need to know how I can handle it. 2- I am using wordpress + woocommerce. The website is built with categories and subcategories. When I create a product in the product page backend is it advisable to select just the lowest subcategory or is it better to select both main category and subcategory in which the product belongs? I usually select the subcategory alone. Looking forward to your reply and suggestions. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cinzia091 -
How to handle duplicate content with Bible verses
Have a friend that does a site with bible verses and different peoples thoughts or feelings on them. Since I'm an SEO he came to me with questions and duplicate content red flag popped up in my head. My clients all generate their own content so not familiar with this world. Since Bible verses appear all over the place, is there a way to address this from an SEO standpoint to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Multiply domains and duplicate content confusion
I've just found out that a client has multiple domains which are being indexed by google and so leading me to worry that they will be penalised for duplicate content. Wondered if anyone could confirm a) are we likely to be penalised? and b) what should we do about it? (i'm thinking just 301 redirect each domain to the main www.clientdomain.com...?). Actual domain = www.clientdomain.com But these also exist: www.hostmastr.clientdomain.com www.pop.clientdomain.com www.subscribers.clientdomain.com www.www2.clientdomain.com www.wwwww.clientdomain.com ps I have NO idea how/why all these domains exist I really appreciate any expertise on this issue, many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bisibee10 -
How to Fix Duplicate Page Content?
Our latest SEOmoz crawl reports 1138 instances of "duplicate page content." I have long been aware that our duplicate page content is likely a major reason Google has de-valued our Web store. Our duplicate page content is the result of the following: 1. We sell audio books and use the publisher's description (narrative) of the title. Google is likely recognizing the publisher as the owner / author of the description and our description as duplicate content. 2. Many audio book titles are published in more than one format (abridged, unabridged CD, and/or unabridged MP3) by the same publisher so the basic description on our site would be the same at our Web store for each format = more duplicate content at our Web store. Here's are two examples (one abridged, one unabridged) of one title at our Web store. Kill Shot - abridged Kill Shot - unabridged How much would the body content of one of the above pages have to change so that a SEOmoz crawl does NOT say the content is duplicate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
How to remove duplicate content, which is still indexed, but not linked to anymore?
Dear community A bug in the tool, which we use to create search-engine-friendly URLs (sh404sef) changed our whole URL-structure overnight, and we only noticed after Google already indexed the page. Now, we have a massive duplicate content issue, causing a harsh drop in rankings. Webmaster Tools shows over 1,000 duplicate title tags, so I don't think, Google understands what is going on. <code>Right URL: abc.com/price/sharp-ah-l13-12000-btu.html Wrong URL: abc.com/item/sharp-l-series-ahl13-12000-btu.html (created by mistake)</code> After that, we ... Changed back all URLs to the "Right URLs" Set up a 301-redirect for all "Wrong URLs" a few days later Now, still a massive amount of pages is in the index twice. As we do not link internally to the "Wrong URLs" anymore, I am not sure, if Google will re-crawl them very soon. What can we do to solve this issue and tell Google, that all the "Wrong URLs" now redirect to the "Right URLs"? Best, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmvw0 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on an ecommerce site
Hi all, I have an ecommerce site which has a standard block of text on 98% of the product pages. The site also has a blog. Because these cause duplicate content and duplicate title issues respectively, how can I ever get around this? Would having the standard text on the product pages displayed as an image help? And how can I stop the blog being listed as duplicate titles without a nofollow? We already have the canonical attribute applied to some areas where this is appropriate e.g. blog and product categories. Thanks for your help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMoore850