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Hello everybody,

1. I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc).

What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site...  what do you think?

2. Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ?

Thanks in advance for your opinions!

Thanks Thomas!

At the end, I have the feeling that we won't have to bother that much with that because the price they will ask is too expensive / not worth...

But it's still interesting to have some insights about this topic and I hope it helps / will help others

Yes we're competing on the same keywords and the websites architectures are similar, which doens't mean that we will be able to redirect all the traffic to the corresponding pages easily...

We know the traffic they are actually getting via search engines... but I would like to know for how long this traffic would be redirected to us...

My guess is that in 5 - 10 days, their domain won't "send" us traffic anymore (due to 301 redirections or due to low rankings because of the lost backlinks -> their main backlinks come from their other websites).

Thanks Carla for your detailed answer

We already know the domain we want to buy is not receiving (lots of) spammy links.

The reason we want to know how long will it continue to appear on the SERPs is to know how much traffic (= money) it can bring to us, so we can decide how much is the domain worth...

Hi Carla,

Thanks for your answer.

But I think your case is different since we don't want to replace our domain name by the one we want to buy: we just want to redirect the SERPs traffic to our site. Any idea for how long the bought domain will still show up in the SERPs after the site is down and and the 301 redirects are enabled?

PS: by the way, did you use some specialized platform to buy / transfer the domain? (to avoid to pay without receiving the domain access)

Buying there website is not something we are considering due to technology and more complex questions... and not only that their site profile is not very good, their direct traffic / brand is not good neither: all their traffic comes from search engines, directly to category and product pages... that's why I'm still interested to have a better idea for how long they will show up in the SERPs after the site is down and and the 301 redirects are enabled

Do you have an idea? Should we expect days / weeks / months?

Yes, the goal is not to redirect everything to the homepage but to try to "automatically / manually" get a 301 redirect to our corresponding pages.

Our competitor doesn't have a lot of backlinks (the main ones come from their sites and they will take them off as soon as they shut down) so what we really want to take advantage of is the traffic from the SERPs.... but how long will they continue to appear there?

Hi !

Our main competitor is shutting down (website will be offline) at the end of the month and we are negotiating with them to buy their domain name: the idea would be to take advantage of their good rankings in the SERPs to redirect traffic to our pages (we're planning to crawl their site or get their sitemap and redirect th category / product pages to ours).

The question is: for how long this strategy will be useful: days / weeks / months? (= for how long their pages will continue to appear in the SERPs from the day we enable the 301 redirections to our site?)

Thanks in advance for your help!

And if you have better suggestions, we're up to hear them of course..

Cheers

This would mean that we have to lower the quality of the white-branded website pages (putting less filters, contents) or simply "nofollow" it..

Thanks Matt for your opinion!

(For the ones interested in the topic, there is also an interesting blog post + comments here: http://moz.com/ugc/using-whitelabel-sites-for-seo)

Hi guys,

We might have as a new project to create a white branded website for a big portal in our local market (which have a strongest domain than ours): the goal will be to reach their big mass of users and if possible, place this new site BEHIND us on the SERPs.

Since the content of the new website will basically be the same, we are considering 2 solutions:

• to "noindex" the site on search engines, which is a "secure" way to not create ourself a competitor

• to allow the site to be indexed on search engines but using the "rel=canonical" strategy to not be affected by duplicate content penalties

(For example, we plan to add rel='canonical' href='http://www.ourdomain.com/category1/product2' /> on their page http://newsubdomain.theirdomain.com/category1/product2)

The main question is: can the white branded website rank better than our site even with the "canonical" strategy?

(Of course we could "lower" the quality of the white-branded website pages to avoid that risk... but if somebody has better advices, we would be glad to hear them )