Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello everybody, 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? 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!

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

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 😉 )

Did someone ever experience some "collateral damages" when it's about "disallowing" some URLs? Some old URLs are still present on our website and while we are "cleaning" them off the site (which takes time), I would like to to avoid their indexation through the robots.txt file. The old URLs syntax is "/brand//13" while the new ones are "/brand/samsung/13." (note that there is 2 slash on the URL after the word "brand") Do I risk to erase from the SERPs the new good URLs if I add to the robots.txt file the line "Disallow: /brand//" ? I don't think so, but thank you to everyone who will be able to help me to clear this out 🙂

Hi guys, We're planning to change our URLs structure for our product pages (to make them more SEO friendly) and it's obviously something very sensitive regarding the 301 redirections that we have to take with... I'm having a doubt about Mister Google: if we slowly do that modification (area by area, to minimize the risk of problems in case of bad 301 redirection), would  we lose rankings in the search engine? (I'm wondering if they might consider our website is not "coherent" -> not the same product page URLs structure for all the product pages during some time) Thanks for your kind opinion 😉

Hi guys, We are a price comparison website with thousands of webpages. Most of them are product webpages with not so good quality content. Only price information and product image, no product details nor costumers reviews. We are planing to focus on less product categories by adding reviews, details, better images etc... and I would like to know if I should maintain the other "not-so-good" products in other categories or if I should remove it from index to leverage domain average content quality. Our index size is 200k pages and we are planning to focus on 10k pages max. Thanks for your help.