Duplicate content across multiple e-commerce sites
-
Hi,
This may have been discussed here before though I couldn't find a definitive answer, but I was wondering what the best practice for having multiple e-commerce sites with some of the same products on both is.
If Site A has 200 products, and Site B has 300 products, and 50 overlap, do they absolutely have to have unique product descriptions? The descriptions have already been rewritten to be different from the manufacturer's description, but do they need to be changed again?
Or should the 50 products only be listed on one site or the other?
Sites like csnstores.com seem to have the same descriptions as the subsidiary sites that they have, but maybe they have different sidebars/footers/etc which make the content considered original?
-
A site with a lower domain/page authority may get filtered out by Google. Why don't you use cross domain canonical tags if you can't fix the duplicate content issue at the moment. There is a good post on this topic on seomoz. You just need to search for it.
-
The thing is that comments and reviews take time to generate. If I start these sites and there's a lot of duplicate content for the items listed on both sites for a while, will that cause both sites to be penalized?
-
No they don't need to have absolutely unique product description. You can make your product pages unique through user generated contents (UGC) like comments, reviews etc. However in the end you must find a way to create uniqueness on your product pages.
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
-
Community Discussion - How do you create and distribute content?
Hi there, Moz Community! It's Thanksgiving here in the US, and this year I'm thankful for the release of Moz Content. 🙂 With that in mind, I'd like to revisit Kelsey Libert's November 5 Moz Blog post on creating and distributing content to kick of a community discussion to hold us over during this long weekend. Kelsey said: "Some content is designed to “go viral,” while other times a piece of content intended to stay among friends takes the Internet by storm. But whether planned or unplanned, rapidly-shared content has several commonalities. One of the key factors is that the content creates a strong emotional response in viewers." What do you think? How much effort do you put into getting your content distributed? Do you have particular strategies for creating your content? What are they?
Content Development | | MattRoney5 -
New sister site VS site redesign and dangers of SEO dilution??
Hi I’ve got a site that is ranking #2 in my area for my chosen keyword but the site is in need of an expansion and overhaul its only one page at the moment and to rank for more keywords its need to be expanded. Or another option is I do own another domain and I was thinking of maybe instead of overhauling the new site launching that as a sister company aimed more at the corporate market, as my first site is a bit more alternative in domain name and content. The thing is i'm not sure how this will affect my SEO they will be on the same CBlock and be offering similar services.
Content Development | | genkee0 -
What makes high quality content?
Content is becoming more and more important in rankings and I was wondering what exactly Google defines a good content. Any ideas?
Content Development | | EJDekkers0 -
Stolen Content and a Panda Penalty
Hey Folks Question for those folks that have spent some time helping people with the recent penalties and the like. I have a client who has a clear Panda Penalty, huge drop in traffic on the initial Panda date and a further drop on the second date. Much smaller incremental drops on subsequent recent updates as well. From digging in it seems fairly cut and dry - copyscape shows another 250 or so sites with content from this site and there are nearly 2000 external URLs with duplicate content across these sites. We are talking complete, shameless copies of all of the text, sometimes the images as well. The client claims the content is all 100% unique and is his content and that the other blogs must have stolen his content resulting in the penalty - which, if it is true, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, kind of sucks. Now, many moons ago, way before Penguin or Panda (maybe around 2006) I had a client that had suddenly lost all traffic and their historical rankings. No funny business, it was a small company, had been online since around 2000 and they were pretty much the first of their kind and always did very well from organic search. As it turned out, the content from the site had not really changed since it was set up and as lots of companies had sprung up offering a similar service they had seen their content copied wholesale, across many sites, all over the world. We attempted to contact many of these sites and got some results but many were just old, abandoned copy cat sites on advert supported hosting that had ceased to trade so we maybe got rid of about 20%. Well, in the end we just decided to rewrite the content, we did this and sure enough, the site bounced back to it's previous standing and has been pretty much there ever since. Now that was kind of easy, the site had maybe 20 pages, and it needed a sprucing up but in this case the site has around 500 pages so doing a rewrite is not going to be so easy. Problem is, I don't see removal requests being particularly successful either. So, I see the options and steps as being. Contact all the sites and request the removal of the content use the Google content removal facility:
Content Development | | Marcus_Miller
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals File a DMCA takedown for anything remaining Report Scraped Pages to Google:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGM4TXhIOFd3c1hZR2NHUDN1NmllU0E6MQ&ndplr=1 Submit a spam report for all sites involved ? Submit a reconsideration request to let Google know what we have been doing (unlikely In a nutshell, do everything we can to get this content removed and then documenting this to Google in the hope we catch hold of someone who hears our plight. Interestingly enough, this is a sensitive one, so no URL but I would welcome any thoughts or experiences any of you may have had with similar problems. There is a little extra info here from Matt Cutts + Barry Schwartz that kind of tallies with my approach above but would really like to hear any feedback. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-stolen-content-13243.html Cheers all Marcus0 -
We are contemplating whether to put a blog on our site.
The reasons we want to put one up is obviously for SEO reasons but since we are a small business with limited resources the higher ups are worried that we will start strong but slack off. Some feel that it's worse to start and not keep up the blog as it gives an unprofessional vibe to google and other users. I maintain that I will try to keep it up to the best of my abilities and that it's better to have something than nothing. What do you feel and do you have any experiences in this?
Content Development | | EcomLkwd0 -
Onsite Content - Word Count & KW Density
Does the word count of a webpage make a difference to search engines? Are longer word counts on pages indexed higher or given higher priority? For example,say you have 300 words of copy packed with 20 keywords, and say you also have 700 words of copy that have the same 20 keywords worked in, does Google have a preference over which one it ranks higher?
Content Development | | greentent0 -
Resolving duplicate text issues with a duplicate image?
We are a listing site for programs overseas. Many of our listings are inherently the same content, because in many cases the same exact information applies. We have resolved duplicate content issues to some extent by making some of the content in these listings unique. However, for the rest of the content which is going to be the same for about 100 pages, we were wondering if its better to have an image in place instead of duplicate text content (this would basically be an image of the text in question). We know this is a problem, because this is inherently duplicate content as well (only its a duplicate image instead of duplicate text). However, what's the best solution to this problem, and is a duplicate image just asking for trouble, or might this actually be a good idea?
Content Development | | dunklea0 -
What's the best way to list products with multiple size options?
For some of my suppliers, there may be a Model A, Model B, and Model C. Within each model, the height and the width may be the same, but there might be 10 variants of length. Is is better to just list the 3 models on 3 separate product pages and have the various lengths as an option in a drop-down menu on each page, or should I actually create 30 different product pages? Just listing 3 would seem to be better from a usability perspective, but having 30 might lead to more pages being indexed. I believe that I'll have 30 different entries in my Google/Bing Product Search feeds, but what is the recommended practice for actual sites? Thanks
Content Development | | nks20120