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We have "duplicate content" warning in our moz report which mostly revolve around our product listing (eCommerce site) where various filters return 0 results (and hence show the same content on the page). Do you think those need to be addressed, and if so how would you prevent product listing filters that appearing as duplicate content pages? should we use rel=canonical or actually change the content on the page?

Hi all, We've been running an eCommerce marketplace for more than 2.5 years now. Most of our traffic and revenue have been from organic traffic, which have been growing steadily with our inventory and brand, peaking at March this year. From there, we started losing organic traffic (and revenue) each month, at a rate of about 15-20% - for no reason we can understand. In addition, some of our older pages no longer appear in search results (unless we add the name of the site to the search query). We launched a redesign on the end of May, which seemed to initially improve engagement, but didn't affect this trend of lower organic traffic. Our webmaster tools doesn't show anything special - if anything, we made an effort to clean-up every 404 that appears there and other small issues. We did make the following changes very recently, but it did not seem to have a positive effect (so far): We have deep pagination for some categories of the site, and we just added rel=prev,next in the head of every paginated series on the site. We started generating a dynamic sitemap and submitted it to google. For some reason only about a fourth of the pages on the sitemap are indexed. In addition, the "index status" as reported by webmaster tools shows some weird numbers. First, the number there is way bigger than the amount of pages we have - possibly all the combinations of our listing categories and pagination. That number was constant for a while, before taking a deep earlier this year, rising back up and declining again for the last couple of months. Screenshot of the graph What would be the first steps you'd take to understand the core of the problem? we're really at a loss here.

We have an eCommerce website with original software products. We want to syndicate our content to partner and affiliate websites, but are worried about the effect of duplicate content all over the web. Note that this is a relatively high profile project, where thousands of sites will be listing hundreds of our products, with the exact same name, description, tags, etc. We read the wonderful and relevant post by Kate Morris on this topic (here: http://mz.cm/nXho02) and we realize the duplicate content is never the best option. Some concrete questions we're trying to figure out: 1. Are we risking penalties of any sort? 2. We can potentially get tens of thousands of links from this concept, all with duplicate content around them, but from PR3-6 sites, some with lots of authority. What will affect our site more - the quantity of mediocre links (good) or the duplicate content around them (bad)? 3. Should we sacrifice SEO for a good business idea?